A Bit Of Sweed hornpipe

Another tune by Mike Mussell from my session’s old tune book, ‘A Bit of Sweed’, dated 2014. Mike adds in parentheses (Hornpipe & Swedish Schottish), so the B part may be repurposed from a Swedish tune (he doesn’t say what or which).

It’s peculiar because of the key. Being an English session, we mostly play in the keys of G and D, as well s their relative minors Em and Bm. This is mostly due to the fact that in English folk music, D/G melodeons are the most common. The D minor key, with the C# accidental, certainly gives it a very un-English feel.

This tune is perfectly playable on a 21 button D/G melodeon, as it has the Bb accidental if the box had the thirds stopped. I’ve seen a video of a Finnish box player utilise their thumb to play the accidental (which is located on the D row 1st button pull), it’s quite impressive, this certainly could be a show-off piece!

Thanks for posting these Mike Mussell compositions, JayN. The opening bars of this one remind me of a tune that was a jazz standard way back, but of course I can’t remember the title or the rest of it, which will irk me for days. Anybody else with a similar vague recollection?

One detail … The E7 chord in bar 4 would clash with the G natural (which sounds correct). Perhaps an Em7 chord instead?

Bazza, that’s how it was written out, it may be an instance of deliberate dissonance (not uncommon in folk dance music from various places in Europe), or perhaps the more likely thing is that Mike was playing this on a D/G box with stopped thirds in the bass (required for this song), he knew it was an ‘E’ of some sort and chose to write E7 as a stab in the dark.

In the key of Dm, the chord with an E root is an E-diminished, aka Em7b5, a chord that is by nature full of dissonance and clashing. The notes in this chord are E-G-Bb-D (An Em7 with the B flattened). E7 has the notes E-G#-B-D, and the Em he would have had on his box is E-G-B. is his bass end (with the thirds stopped) would play the E-B, the melody G, with the key implying both D and Bb. Em7 is certainly the closest to what he would have played, but Edim is technically the correct chord. Maybe he only played the bass note of E without the chord part – that would solve any problems in practical terms.

He may have written E7 because asking folk English musicians to consider a diminished chord would have been a losing battle.

I’m going to leave the setting as Mike wrote it, but add the correct chord in brackets.