Annotation:Jackson's Bottle of Claret

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JACKSON'S BOTTLE OF CLARET. AKA and see "Jackson's Mistake," "River Cree (The)." Irish, Jig (6/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The tune appears in Benjamin Cooke's Cooke's Selection of the Present Favourite Country Dances for the Year 1796 (No. 3) and Paul Alday's A Pocket Volume of Airs, Duets, Songs, Marches, etc. (Dublin, c. 1800-1803), reprinted from the latter by O'Neill in Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody (1922, 148). The tune and title were entered into the large 1840 music manuscript collection of multi-instrumentalist John Rook (Waverton, Cumbria), and the jig also appears as "Jackson's Bottle of Claret" in vol. 2 of the large mid-19th century music manuscript collection of County Cork cleric and uilleann piper biography:James Goodman.

Breathnach (1996) finds it under the title The tune, under the title "Jackson's Mistake", can be found in a manuscript by Fermanagh musician Patrick Gunn and in John Murphy's A Collection of Irish Airs & Jiggs with Variations (Edinburgh, 1809, p. 22). The first part of "Fat Man's Fancy (The)" in O'Neill's Music of Ireland (No. 907) is shared with "Jackson's Bottle of Claret."

The alternate title "River Cree (The)" is the name by which the tune appeared in Cooke's Selection of Country Dances (1796). "The River Cree" is the name of a Scottish Country Dance, still popular, named for the River Cree in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, which forms part of the boundary between the counties of Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbrightshire. A number of jigs are played for the dance medley, although it most often starts with "Jackson's Bottle of Claret."

Source for notated version: copied from Paul Alday's Pocket Volume (c. 1800) [O'Neill].

Printed sources: O'Neill (Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody), 1922; No. 133.

Recorded sources:

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