The Old Lancashire Hornpipe three-two

Though I know it as the Reed House Rant (as do many) I’ve heard it more often referred to as the Old Lancashire Hornpipe so I’ve put it up as that.

it is blatantly called the reed house rant abby! everyone at summer school will call it that and summer school is like the most influential group in the world…obviously! lmao xxxxxxxxxxx

From Mike Raven’s ‘One Thousand English Country Dance tunes’ :

T: Lancashire Hornpipe
M: 3/2
L: 1/8
R: three-two
K: Dmaj
B2A2G2 | F3E D2f2 e2d2 | e2E4 B2 A2G2 | F3E D2f2 e2dc |
d2D4 :|
|: B2A2G2 | F2A2 G2B2 A2d2 | e2E4 B2 A2G2 | F2A2 G2B2 A2c2 |
d2D4 :|
|: f2g2a2 | f3e d2f2 e2d2 | c2e4 f2 g2a2 | f3e d2f2 e2dc | d2D4 :|

It appears notated in 3/4 in the book, but I have adjusted the note values accordingly, for ease of comparison with mehitabel’s version.

Cheers NCRC, that version is the one on S&B’s “Tunes”, only a few small changes, must admit that I quite like those octave jumps on the Ds…🙂

Tune!!

Hello dan?

I’m here! Waaaasssssuuuupppp?

Man I’ve been looking for music for this tune EVERYWHERE ever since i got Tunes (S&B). Big big thankyou!

Pleased to help!

HOW, just HOW could you call it the Lancashire Hornpipe? It is the Reed House Rant, dammit, you know that, and nothing else! “Ooh, look at me, I know two different names for this tune, and I’m going to post it under the crap name nobody likes just to be cool!”
That’s you in a nutshell, isn’t it? I SAID ISN’T IT, MEHITABEL TWENTY-THREE?!!

Pah! Some people…

As far as I’m aware it’s called The Old Lancashire Hornpipe by everyone except those who’ve been to Folkworks.

Well we’re the only ones that matter!
And to be fair, it was David Oliver and Alistair Anderson (I guess) who decided on the name, and they’re not exactly impressionable kids…
Not that we are, of course…
😉

It’s on the Spiers and Boden album as The Old Lancashire Hornpipe (free information to anyone who can LOOK ON AMAZON) and i trust Spiers and Boden implicitly so you can just SHUT UP JOE CASCADING STYLE SHEET, MARTIN CLARKE IS RIGHT!!!!!!!! ANYWAY ARE YOU AROUND THIS WEEKEND?? HAVE YOU SPOKEN TO LUKASZ?? I’M COMING TO LDDDDDDDDDNNNNNNN!!!!!!111

If you look in ‘Hardcore English’ compiled and edited by Barry Callaghan and published 2007 by EFDSS you’ll see two near adjacent entries one for Old Lancashire Hornpipe p. 77, and one for Read House Rant p.78. The version given by here is pretty much exactly Old Lancashire Hornpipe as published in Hardcore English - all three parts. The notes for Read House Rant state that the tune is “clearly related” to Old Lancashire Hornpipe.

One of the massive strengths of this great book is that it has comprehensive notes of the sources to the 300 tunes in the book (The inside cover says that they come from “English Manuscript, Recorded and Aural Sources”) . The sources for Read House Rant are manuscripts associated with the North-East (Vickers and Atkinson) hence the choice of North-East name for the tune when playing it in the North-East perhaps ??. The version of Read House Rant (Atkinson, 1694)given in Hardcore English has 8 parts. It is subtley different to Old Lancashire Hornpipe.
Buy the book and see, or look it up on the FANRE website where you can see an image of the relevant pages of the manuscript.

I got the book before Christmas and have been dipping into it, but recently got the opportunity for a much closer look. I rate it as essential reading for anyone playing English music. It’s not so much the choice of tunes, which are excellent, as the extra information: the introduction, the notes and way that Barry has managed to place the collection both squarely in the internet age and also has managed for the first time to link all the tunes back to earlier sources, both manuscripts and musicians. It’s a fantastic achievement, a fantastic book and everyone here should get themselves a copy.

Sorry i mistyped:

Not FANRE website but FARNE:
http://www.asaplive.com/Farne/Home.cfm

Beg pardon

Bye bye super-cool ascii art!!!

Joe, can you call me, we have much to discuss!!!!!!! (also I am crying because I have just finished combing my dreads out, it HURT and now i feel empty and alone)

Nice performance of this tune on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlBtKuQMdPY

play video

Baltic Crossing are playing it in their current tour as Reed House Rant and it is practically identical to this version.

“Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson”, 1990, edited by Lewis Lockwood and Edward H. Roesner is available online. and has a whole section on The Lancashire Hornpipe. It is clear from the article (which I do not have the formal musical knowledge to be able to understand in full) that this form of dance existed by the 15th century and was very popular in “the Northern Counties” (apparently Cheshire and Derbyshire and north of them, very likely into Scotland) over a period of several hundred years during which dances and tunes might get one name or another according to where they were being danced and played.

There seem to be relatively few basic 3/2 tunes, but with masses of variations, and they were originally played on the instrument called the hornpipe and after that they were associated with the bagpipe and then the strings got them and played the same tunes either “bagpipe way” or with more notes. They were also used by formal composers as themes from which to compose further complex variations. All this goes to explain the confusion over versions and names. There’s not much use arguing over it. Let’s enjoy it instead.

Setting as played at the Golden Guinea pub session, Bristol, UK.

Cleaning up the messes above…

A melody wide open for varations, having a little fun with it this cold day in Lancashire… Brrrrr! 😉

More or less as played in Preston, Lancashire, allowing for usual folk variation. I’m not from Lancashire but picked this up from local musicians having initially learnt he standard three-part tune. Haven’t yet found out where the five-part tune comes from.

Update: my pub source tells me the D and E parts may well have been added more recently, though in the style of the original tune, by a band who recorded this on Fellside in the 1970s. So is this then the New Old Lancashire Hornpipe? Either way the version’s from Lancaster and we play it in Preston.

Update on this: at Whitby Folk Week 2019 (which was in fact the last festival I went to! :’( despite it now being halfway through 2021), I was at a Northumbrian tunes session, led by Alistair Anderson, one of the foremost experts on Northumbrian music. He started this tune, and played it with a Cnat in the B part, pretty much as in the original transcription here. After the session, I went and asked him all these questions, about the name, variants, etc. What he answered was: there’s basically a Northumbrian version of the tune, and an everywhere-else version. In Northumberland, they call it Reed House Rant, and play it with a Cnat, and everywhere else they call it the Old Lancashire Hornpipe, and don’t play the Cnat, going up to the E instead. At Folkworks, of course, they taught us the Northumbrian version, Folkworks being the Northumbrian-music propaganda machine that it is. ;)

He also played me an extended many-part version, with both 2nd parts, and three or four more parts besides! I don’t remember where he said that extended version originated from, though. I’ll try to find it and transcribe it.

Here’s an extended version (X:8) which I think is probably as given as setting 2 of this tune on p 39 of the John Offord collection, ‘John of the Green, The Cheshire Way’. (The chords shown here vary slightly from those in Offord).

This is a version from the Winders of Wyresdale. In their collection, it is called the Cheshire Hornpipe!

Of course, here in Lancaster it has always been known as the Old Lancaster after Greg Stevens included it on “ Beggar Boy of the North”. Still a seminal album for Northern tunes.
Www.andyhornby.net/Winders.html

That makes at least three three-twos related to Cheshire. This one (because of the alternate title), Cheshire Rounds, and then there’s one called “A Cheshire’s Hornpipe” on John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris’s album Shreds and Patches. I always assumed the last of these was named such because it originated in Cheshire but had no other name.