Annotation:Every Lad His Lass

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EVERY LAD HIS LASS. English, Country Dance Tune (2/2 time). E Dorian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Sharp): ABB (Barnes). "Every Lad His Lass" first appears in all four editions of London publisher John Young's Second Volume of the Dancing Master (1710-1728). It also was published in Walsh & Randall's The New Country Dancing Master...Second Book (1710), and four editions of John Walsh's Compleat Country Dancing Master (1718-1749), the last edition published by his son, also John Walsh.

There is a song called "Last Martinmas gone a year" from Mark Lonsdale's 1785 opera "The Spanish Rivals," performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, that goes:

Last Martinmas gone a year,
Odzooks! How pleas'd was I
When hiring day was come,
And flails were all flung by.
Our hearts and heels were light,
We danc'd, an' we were mad,
Wi' every lad his lass,
And every lass her lad.

The song was, of course, written long after Young's tune was published, and thus has no direct connection; still, it illustrates that the phrase was in common usage.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Barnes (English Country Dance Tunes), 1986. Sharp (Country Dance Tunes), 1909; p. 48. Young (Second Volume of the Dancing Master), 1710; p. 162.

Recorded sources:

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