Annotation:Jack the Jolly Ploughboy

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 JACK THE JOLLY PLOUGHBOY. AKA and see "Jolly Plowman (1) (The)/Jolly Ploughman (1) (The)," "Low-Back Car (2) (The)/Low-Backed Car (2) (The)," "To Rodney We Will Go," "Farewell--but whenever you welcome the hour," "Drop of Dram (The)." Irish, Air (6/8 time). E Major. Standard tuning fiddle). AAB. O'Sullivan (1983) finds the earliest printing of this air in Glasgow publisher James Aird's Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs, volume III (1788), p. 160, under the title "To Rodney we will go," and notes Moore used the melody for his song "Farewell--but whenever you welcome the hour" (he believes Moore's source for the tune to have been "Drop of Dram (The)" in O'Farrell's Pocket Companion, book IV). Moffat prints the song in his Minstrelsy of Ireland, pp. 12-13, to an identical tune as Bunting (1840). Samuel Lover's best-known song, "The Low-Back'd Car," uses the melody. Further, O'Sullivan finds variants of the melody in Baring-Gould's Folk Songs of the West Country as "A Hunting we will go" (p. 12) and in Moeran's Six Suffolk Folk Songs as "Nutting Song," and in fact it has melodic similarities to the English tune "Nutting Girl."  Source for notated version: noted by the Irish collector Edward Bunting from the playing of harper J. Duncan in 1792.  Printed sources: O'Sullivan/Bunting, 1983; No. 23, pp. 38-39.  Recorded sources:

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