Ingonish (jig) on The Session

Ingonish

This is a composition by a Cape Breton Fiddler, Mike McDougall. Personally I prefer starting with the second part.
Closely related to "The Creel of Turf."

Sorry for the mistakes

When I posted the tune, I mistakenly wrote AFE E3, but it should be AGF E3. I’ve already modified ABC detail.

Names

I know this tune, in Aminor, but called the ten penny bit, and i always thought it was trad. Scottish….? Good Tune though, all the same!

Yeah i know it as ten p bit too. But I play it in a different key and i leatnt it with the parts the other way round.

Accident?

Yeah, I know what you both mean.
In fact, I learned the Irish tune in A minor called Tenpenny Bit first, and I was surprised when I came across Ingonish in Calico’s album. But several tunes have Tennpenny Bit, so I did not mention to avoid confusion.
I’m not sure whether this tune is traditional and mistakenly attributed to Mike MacDougall, or unconsciouly he imitated Tenpenny Bit.

In order of submission and for easy comparison:

The Tenpenny Bit
https://thesession.org/tunes/109

The Creel of Turf (Up Sligo)
https://thesession.org/tunes/537

It’s a bit of a cheek of Mike McDougall to call this tune his own composition - it doesn’t particularly offer any new material. It’s clearly the A and B parts of the 2 trad tunes above just patched together and swapped round. It’s a nice little jig though.

Just read that it’s in doubt whether he was the composer, and it’s thought the tune might be Irish in origin, which to me seems likely. Perhaps it’s a sort of setting of two half-remembered tunes peculiar to Cape Breton, as arranged and played by Mike MacDougall…

Isn’t it strange Mike MacDougall named a misremembered Irish tune after his birthplace? Not sure, but maybe it was just arranged and popularised by Mike MacD. and people started to associate it with the place where he came from.

A lovely jig penned by Mike MacD: https://thesession.org/tunes/3088

That is a nice one yes. They don’t sound to me like they’ve been written by the same person though. That one you’ve linked to sounds very Scottish/English to me, as opposed to straight trad Irish like this one.

Another nice tune attributed to the same person: https://thesession.org/tunes/1796 It doesn’t sound Irish either.

“The Ingonish Jig”

Mike MacDougall, like other musicians, has had things ascribed to him that he personally took no credit for himself. It is more likely that someone else gave it this name and maybe had learned it from Mike, with the later confusions. Also shared with the rest of us, the problem of memory. It doesn’t always work and sometimes that history of not working is passed down from one musicians to another, or from one person writing the sleeve notes for a recording to listening others. We are all so impressionable, eh?

Not fortetting the half remembering tunes ~ and sometimes combining bits together from different sources… There have been some interesting results from remembering one part and not another and improvising to fill in the blanks… Really, how much change is necessary before it can be considered a distinct ‘other’ and given it’s own identity in a name?

Not Mike’s Composition

I’m now convinced that this is a traditional Irish tune. You’ll see why if you look at John and James Kelly’s version of "Up Sligo": https://thesession.org/tunes/537/comments#comment204723

The story I got (can’t recall if I heard it from Jerry Holland or read it in one of his tunebooks edited by Paul Cranford) is that MacDougall found himself playing the tune some time after returning from a trip to Ireland and didn’t know whether he had composed it, remembered it, or something in between. It seems to me that by the time anybody realized what tune or tunes it came from, the name and its association with MacDougall had stuck.

Another version

Yet Another Version

Ten Penny Bit.

Ten Penny Bit it is, but with the A and B parts reversed. I like thie Edor version better on the pipes. Lots of nice fat E crans.
Anyone have any ideas on the Ten Penny Bit name? There would have been no ten penny bits in Ireland before decimalisation.

The name is associated with two tunes: The Little Drummer and Ducks and Oats. Both of those have many other names. I think O’Neill is the earliest printed source using the name Ten Penny Bit. It’s possible that he made up the name or got the name in the U.S.
http://www.ceolas.org/cgi-bin/ht2/ht2-fc2/file=/tunes/fc2/fc.html&style=&refer=&abstract=&ftpstyle=&grab=&linemode=&max=250?Tenpenny+bit

Ingohish

A nice tune of ALTAN heard of the album "Island Angel".
To incorporate in the classical directory

Re: Ingonish

Thanks for the Tenpenny Bit ID, that clears up the A part/B part mystery as well as the key shift.

Ingonish jig

Five settings

Twenty-one comments