Da Road To Houll reel

A Shetland reel composed by the late Tom Anderson - fiddler, teacher, composer.

Houll is a place on the small Shetland island of Whalsay, though I couldn’t swear that is the only place of that name in the Shetland Islands.

On Track 5 of https://thesession.org/recordings/257/comments.

In “Haand Me Doon Da Fiddle” Tom Anderson says “Dis tun was written in 1936 whin I came up to Unst to visit a schoolmaister friend o’ mine. It happened it dat moarnin wis da prizegiving an I was axed to play at it. I guid fir a walk an da tun cam in me head. Da place I wis walkin ower wis caaed da Houll Road bit I tocht da Road ta Houll soonded better”

An arrangement for fiddle ensemble (2 fiddle lines, cello, and chords) is available in Weaver MacFarlane’s Choon Book, a free download from cracklingsmarts.com.

(Actually, it isn’t yet. Send an email to graeme@cracklingsmarts.com if you want to receive a pdf of the arrangement. It is available to listen to in Soundcloud, though, and will be included in the next release of the Choon Book, probably by early October 2017.)

Audio file of this arrangement is available on Soundcloud (just search for Weaver MacFarlane).

I don’t think the X:1 version is *quite* right. When I’ve heard it played, bar 3 of the A part is | A2A2 ABde | and bars 3 and 11 of the B part are | G2B2 ABde |.

I tend to agree with you, Borderer, it sounds better the way you have it. The way it’s given above (X:1), however, is how Tom Anderson presented it in his 1970 collection ‘Da Mirrie Dancers’ AND his 1979 collection ‘Haand Me Doon da Fiddle’; and it’s also the way it was published in the ‘Tom Anderson Collection Vol.3’ (East Lothian 2013). So we might prefer it the way “our” way, the question of “rightness” is not black and white.

I agree that the ABde works better than ABcd but, as is often the case, it’s probably down to what one is used to hearing. If I played it with the ABcd run often enough I guess it would eventually sound right.