Ed Pearlman’s Tunes for May

Free Gardener was written by Alexander Walker while he was a gardener for Castle Newe (rhymes with "meow", don't ask me why!) and a member of the Order of Free Gardeners (a guild similar to the Free Masons). Ed will tell about his visits to Walker's house, and his neighbor, fiddler/guitarist/singer Jonny Hardie, who runs the Aberdeenshire band Old Blind Dogs. Before Walker left Scotland for North America; his book of tunes was typeset but not published. It is now available from Paul Cranford in Cape Breton.

Lieutenant Howard Douglas is a strathspey by Robert Mackintosh (a teacher of Nathaniel Gow's). Ed learned it from Cape Breton fiddler Joe Cormier, so it has some ambiguous F#s in the B part that create an exciting dissonance against the D minor chords.

The Random Jig is by James Hill, who was born in Scotland and lived in Northumbria. He is well known for writing many hornpipes, such as High Level (17.13) and Beeswing (not in our repertoire), and lots of other tunes, such as the Earl Grey strathspey.

These three tunes can be played as a set. Why a march, strathspey, jig set? In the 18th century Gow Collections, there were several pages of tune pairs offered as suggestions for dance fiddlers moving from strathspey to quicktime, the strathspey-into-reel being the most popular kind of social dance at the time. Most of Gow's dance tune pairs were strathspey into reel, but some of the strathspeys were paired with a jig. It's fun to play this combination sometimes!