The Mortgage Burn reel

From: The Lighthouse Collection, Cranford
Cape Breton

Made by Gordon MacLean

This has become a session favourite in Cape Breton. You can hear it on Brenda Stubbert’s CD "Some Tasty Tunes".

http://www.cranfordpub.com/tunes/CapeBreton/Mortgage_Burn.htm

I recorded this tune in a session in London a few weeks ago. I only managed to record the last time through and that is what the dots are based on so I can’t be sure that it was played the same everytime through.

No one there knew what it was called, and no one that I’ve played it to since has known it either. Any ideas?

it’s Mortgage Burn
https://thesession.org/tunes/2047

Becoming very popular in Ireland these days. Please call it The Mortgage Burn as the composer intended it to be called. ‘Mortgage burning is a twentieth-century American custom that is the ritual burning of a paid off mortgage document by homeowners. It is done as a celebratory event, and is sometimes accompanied by a party in which extended family and friends are invited.’(Wikipedia) That’s the idea.

Good tune. I’m laughing though, because I’ve always assumed that it was about a small river!

I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting Gordon MacLean the man who ‘made’ this tune! He was playing piano at John Donald Cameron’s ceilidh in Judique, Cape Breton tonight. Lives nearby. An honour, a pleasure- and a humdinging tune to boot!

The first tune has an extra bar in the final B music (9 bar phrase) ??
Does anyone play it like this or is it a mistake?

Tomb, the extra bar is taken from the first line - see how the first time bracket covers the whole fourth bar in the first line of the second part? Not exactly how I’d write it but it does come out correctly.

As played by Troy MacGillivray on his recording "Live At The Music Room".

Played in G major by Sean Og Graham, Niamh Dunne and Jim Murray on Jim’s Sunday Sessions with Barbara Streisand’s Trip to Saginaw, a Liz Carroll tune.

Would a fiddler play this in A or G? If it is Scottish, I should think A?

It’s Cape Breton, ndlxs. There they would always play it in A.

Thanks…I am at best an intermediate fiddler. Intellectually I know how to play…that’s not enough!