Annotation:New Langolee (1)

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NEW LANGOLEE [1] (An Langoli Nuad). AKA and see "Banks of the Dee (The)," "Dear Harp of My Country," "Lango Lee (2)," "Paddy Bull's Expedition." English, Irish; Air (6/8 time, "with expression"). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. A curious item for collector Francis O'Neill Irish collection, as "Lango Lee" was originally a song published in London appearing about 1775. Bruce Olson, found the tune "among the nine country dance tunes used for a comic dance performance in London, The Irish Fair (1772), where it is entitled "New Langolee," and is set too high for a vocal score." The melody was the vehicle for the song "The Banks of the Dee" and the several parodies that followed the original. It had explicitly sexual lyrics, and 'langolee' is supposed to mean 'the stiff dick' in Irish. The song (entitled "Langolee"), from The Festival of Anacreon, seventh edition (1789), begins:

Ye Ladies attend to your juvenile poet,
Whose labours are always devoted to ye,
Whose ambition it is, and most of you know it,
To charm all your hearts, with his Langolee.
Langolee! what sweet vowels compose it,
It is the delight of each fair maid that knows it
And she that does not, may with rapture suppose it,
That Irish shillalee, call'd Langolee.

The air, employed as a country dance under both "Lango Lee" and "New Lango Lee" titles, was published in London in Thomas Skillern's Skillern's Compleat Collection of Two Hundred & Four Reels...Country Dances (1780), and in Charles and Samuel Thompson's Compleat Collection of Two Hundred Country Dances, vol. 4 (1780). The melody appears in several American musicians manuscripts, including the manuscript collections of Captain George Bush (1753?-1797), a fiddler and officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, Eben and William Iriving (Middletown, N.Y. and at sea, 1796), flute player Joseph Cabot (Cambridge, MA., 1784), and P. Van Schaack, Jr. (Kinderhook, N.Y., 1820). "New Lango Lee" also was entered by English musicians into their copybooks; an anonymous early 19th century Staffordshire ms., and T.J. Dixon's second copybook (Lincolnshire, early 19th cent.).

See also note for Annotation:Lango Lee (2) for more.

Source for notated version: George Bush [Keller].

Printed sources: Keller (Fiddle Tunes from the American Revolution), 1992; p. 27. O'Neill (Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies), 1903; No. 248, p. 43. Thompson (Compleat Collection of Two Hundred Country Dances, vol. 4), 1780; p. 26.

Recorded sources:

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