The Fairies’ Revels (jig) on The Session

Three settings

Six comments

Bloody fairies again - - -?

I’m trying my damnedest to convince these guys to stop the revelry for a little old fasioned revolution. Like with the current dark magic taking place in America we need them to shake of their compacency and put some electricity back into things, the sort that might favour more warmly socialistic ideals. You didn’t know that they were socialist, well were the hell have you been? The King and Queen stuff was stuffed ages ago. There’s even a fairies’ union.

Anyway, as they tend to be, not as complacent as I hint - this thing is in at least three different keys somewhere around in these notes, and a couple of very different versions from this one. It is a Lancashire tune, if I remember rightly, and since that’s underfeet here, and there are a hell of a lot of Irish and Catholics hereabouts, well, why not a Lancashire jig. It also has the same name as a march I’ve also submitted. I’ll be back with variants of both. The march was bare bones. So, lets hope that good magic will prevail over the religious right and tyranny… It’s really tough talking to folks that have all the answers and are always ‘right’, no matter what, and everyone else is wrong. I should know, I’ve lived with them over time, and I have family of the ‘Bush’ variety. While they think I’m the black sheep, I think that is more their colour, but I’m the one that is outnumbered.

So, I’m doing everything I can to rustle up some fairies and a bit of magic dust and maybe in four years time it will blow your way across the ocean and there will be change. Maybe it won’t be too late. We hope so. So here’s to revelry and revolution, in whatever small doses we can minister it in…

Origins - - -

1817 - Riley’s Flute Melodies Vol 2, page 25; Reprint: Da Capo, 1973

http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/Source4/S042871.htm

1823 - While it is supposed to exist in the following Lancashire collection, I couldn’t find a listing or transcription for it in the collection as found on Richard Robinson’s excellent site:

http://mytunebook.de/robinson/startrr.html

“The Winder Collection: These tunes come from a collection kept by the Winder family of Wyresdale,Lancashire, England. The collection spans several generations of musicians, and contains a large amount of material, much of which I haven’t seen. This selection has been passed to me by Andy Hornby of Lancaster. According to his notes, the tunes here were written down by John Winder (1789), HSJ Jackson (1823), and Edward + John Winder (1835 - 1841).”

1905 - Hardings All Round Collection; No. 37, pg. 11.

1823 - H.S.J. Jackson - found:

I think the fairies had too much caffeine tonight -

They’ve been pestering me to define ‘priveleged’. It seems they caught Kerry’s closing remarks, something I missed. So they fed it back to me in their lingo, but without an equivalent word for ‘privileged’. After hearing what they say they heard, and they admitted falling asleep during part of the ramble, the nearest I could come to explaining it is to say that Kerry and Bush are so wealthy that they are considered ‘privileged’, having greater benefit from the ‘system’ than the common folk, that meaning for our purposes, me and them. Hey, so maybe they aren’t so common around your place. They regularly pester me and drink up all the liquor whenever there’s a store… I think Jimmy Troy gave them my details. They seem to know him anyway…

About that fairy dust reaching the American shore, the fairies tell me there’s climate change going on, global warming, and that might either slow things up or stop it getting there all together. But then Bush and his boyos say there isn’t any global warming or climate change. I think I prefer the fairies take on this one, as it seems to be in agreement with everyone else except Bush and his alchemists. I wonder, is that giving alchemists a bad name?

The Fairies’ Revels jig