Annotation:Poll of Wapping Hornpipe

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POLL OF WAPPING HORNPIPE. English, Hornpipe. England, Yorkshrire. D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. "Poll of Wapping" was a very popular song by Charles Dibdin [1] (1745–1814) written for his three-act comic opera Thirty Thousand; or Who's the Richest? (1804). The stage work was based on Maria Edgeworth's tale "The Will" in which a person leaves a fortune to whichever of three cousins shall prove the riches at a certain period. It begins on the day of deciding the claim. "Poll of Wapping" (music by William Reeve) was printed on songsheets [Roud Broadside Index B50085] and in numerous late 18th and 19th century songsters such as The Universal Songster, or museum of mirth, Clark's Orphean Warbler, The Vocal Library, The Vocal Wreath and others. The first two stanzas go:

Your London girls, with all their airs,
Must strike to Poll of Wapping Stairs;
No tighter lass is going,
From Iron Gate to Limehouse Hole
You'll never meet a kinder soul:
Not while the Thames is flowing.
And sing Pull away, &c.

Her father, he's a hearty dog,
Poll makes his flip, and serves his grog,
And never stints his measure;
She minds full well the house affairs,
She seldom drinks, and never swears;
And isn't that a pleasure?
And sing Pull away, &c.

Phillip Heath-Coleman finds cognates with "Poll of Wapping" as an untitled tune in William Irwin's (Cumberland) 19th century music manuscript collection, in Ryan's Mammoth Collection as "Morning Fair," and in O'Neill's Music of Ireland as "Tomorrow Morning."

Source for notated version: an MS collection by fiddler Lawrence Leadley, 1827-1897 (Helperby, Yorkshire) [Merryweather & Seattle].

Printed sources: Merryweather & Seattle (The Fiddler of Helperby), 1994; No. 11, p. 30.

Recorded sources:

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