The Humours Of Westmeath slip jig

Played after ‘Dever the Dancer’ on Dervish’s "At the End of the Day" CD. This is Bill Black’s transcription.

John Harvey
Rhodeirish.net

This tune can also be found in O’Neill’s (Krassen edition) as A Blast of Wind, page 80.

This tune is missing the final measure! I mean it’s in the abc, maybe nobody told Jeremy it’d been updated?

It doesn’t matter whether anybody tells me the abc has been updated or not: I can’t change the sheetmusic. That’s why it’s best to make sure that the abc is correct (by testing it in some abc software) before submitting it.

Good to know! Sorry Jeremy. 🙂

This is used on the ‘Back To Titanic’ cd I was given, on the ‘Jack Dawson’s Luck’ track… It’s not a bad track, though I have no idea who plays it… But on there, they have it listed as Humors of Caledon

||: d2d dAG FED | d2d dAF G2E | ABc dAG FGA | =cBc E2F G2E :||
||: d2g fdf ece | d2g fdf g2e | d2g fdf ece | =cBc E2F G2E | d2g fdf ece | d2g fdf g2e | afd gec d2B | =cBc E2F G2E :||

Rhythm:
||: DDC | DDC | DDC | CCC :||
||: DDA | DDA | DDA | CCC :|| D |

As played in PVB session set following The Foxhunter’s Jig and Last Night’s Fun (slip jig)

"William Litton’s Fiddle Tunes 1800-1802",
transcribed by Gale Huntington, section: "Jigs and Other Dances", page 32
Hines Point Publishers
Vinyard Haven, Massachusetts, 1977

More on William Litton & Gale Huntington in the comments here:
https://thesession.org/tunes/13112

B: "O’Neill’s Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies", 1903, page 212, tune #1123
B: "O’Neill’ s Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems", 1907, page 83, tune #416

My version

This setting appears in The Petrie Collection of Irish Music, part II, ed. Charles Villiers Stanford (1905), p. 155, no. 615 as “The Humours of Caledon”.

Transcribed from Liam Kelly & Phillip Duffy’s album, "Sets In Stone".

The oldest source seems to be from William Litton, 1800 to 1802, when he was the musician on board one of sixteen armed ships sailing to China and back. From reading the commentary regarding the transcription of William Litton, "The notes in the text are difficult to decipher because Litten’s handwriting and spelling are both very bad, and in places the paper has bled." Because he was a musician, the musical notes were easy to read.

Definition of Furze: “A thorny evergreen shrub, with yellow flowers.”

There is an actual place, “Yellow Furze,” about 34 Km northwest of Dublin… which also happens to be in the county of Meath (east of Westmeath, the subject of the common title now).

https://youtu.be/PO5iypELLgM

play video

Setting for mouth whistling.

After writing a good few music scores of this kind I realised that D Major is not the best key for mouth whistling. It usually requires changes of octave. And many times there is a choice of where to do them. It can also happen that it is very difficult to keep the original phrasing when doing the octave changes.

But for this particular tune it is quite clear where to do the octave changes, the tune gives you the chance to do them without having to change the phrasing much.

For the melody I took the version of this great album that is in YouTube, it is the second tune in the set:

https://youtu.be/JD53hwDmXPg

play video

Bryce said, "The oldest source seems to be from William Litton, 1800 to 1802…"

Quite a bit earlier than that, it can be found in John Geoghegan’s Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral Bagpipe (1745).