REEL DE L'ENFANT. AKA and see "Gigue Pomponette," "Reel des chasseurs." French-Canadian, Reel. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB (Cranford, Cuillerier): AAB (Duval): AA'B (Joyal). Similar to "Lord MacDonald (4)." The reel was recorded twice by Montreal fiddler Joseph Allard (1873-1947): first, in 1928 as "Reel de l'enfant," and again in 1937 as "Reel des chasseurs," although on the record label he was given the pseudonym 'Maxime Toupin'. Joseph Allard Louis 'Pitou' Boudreault, a fiddler from Saguenay, Quebec, used to play a tune called "Le bobelo," which was the accompaniment for a kind of children's dance (often played before children's bed-time curfew at at a dance, 9pm), with leap-frog movements, that also involved adults and invariably ended in chaos. It was frowned upon by the clergy who tried to suppress it, notes Boudreault. One wonders if Allard did not have something like this in mind when naming the tune. Jean Duval [1] notes that Montreal fiddler Isidore Soucy recorded a version of the tune as "Gigue pomponnette" in 1936, but that all versions can be traced to Scottish fiddler-composer William Marshall's (1748-1833) "<incipit title="load:gordon" width=850 link="https://tunearch.org/wiki/Mr. Gordon of Hallhead’s Strathspey">Mr. Gordon of Hallhead’s Strathspey</incipit>."
Additional notes
Source for notated version: - Learned by Jerry Holland (Inverness, Cape Breton) from fiddler Arthur Muise (Cheticamp, Cape Breton) who had learned it from a tape of Montreal fiddler Jean Carignan [Cranford].
Printed sources : - Cranford (Jerry Holland's Collection), 1995; No. 186, p. 53 (as "Reel des enfants). Cuillerier (Joseph Allard), 1992; p. 15. Jean Duval (La Musique de Joseph Allard 1873-1947), 2018; No. 14, p. 8. Joyal (Danses d'ici: Musique Traditionnelle du Québec), 1994; pp. 15 & 85.
Recorded sources: -Canadian Broadcasting Corporation LM470, Eddie Poirier - "Atlantic Fiddling" (1979). Totem TO-9221, "Ti-Jean Carignan Le Violoneux" (1977). Victor 263548-b (78 RPM), Joseph Allard (1928). "Ti-Jean Carignan, vol. 1" (2006). Ashley MacIsaac - "Close to the Floor" (1992).
See also listing at:
Hear Joseph Allard's 1928 recording at the Virtual Gramophone [1] and at youtube.com [2]
Hear Jean Carignan's recording on youtube.com [3]
