Annotation:Dirlenton Green
X:1 T:Dirlenton Green M:C L:1/8 R:Country Dance B:Wright's Compleat Collection of Celebrated Country Dances (1740, p. 62) Z:AK/Fiddler's Companion K:D e|fd dA F>G AB|=c/c/c cG EGeg|fd dA EG Bg|fa ef d/d/d d:| |:e|defg abaf|ge=cg ecge|defg abaf|ge=ce d/d/d d:|]
DIRLENTON GREEN. English, Country Dance Tune (whole time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. In addition to its appearance in Daniel Wright's 1740 country dance collection (printed in London by John Johnson), the tune appears in John Walsh's The Third Book of the Compleat Country Dancing-Master (London, 1735, p. 354, and in the subsequent edition of 1749, p. 196). The title perhaps refers to Darlington, a market town in County Durham, England. The town's name has had several variants over they years, including Dearthington, Derlinton, and, in Norman times, Derlinton. The town was generally known by the name of ‘Darnton’, or somewhat less politely as ‘Darnton i’ the Dirt’, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to the town’s notoriously muddy, unpaved streets, said to have inspired King James of Scotland and England to write the following uncomplimentary verse, during a visit of 1603:
Darnton has a bonny, bonny church
With a broach upon the steeple
But Darnton is a mucky, mucky town
And mair sham on the people.
