Annotation:Lightly Tripping
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LIGHTLY TRIPPING. Irish, Set Dance (6/8 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. A 'square' set dance tune--eight measures in each part.If there's a primary thread in Trem Neul, it is the one involving the single named figure in the poem, a fiddler named Ned Goggin who in 1838 is caught in a snowstorm and seeks shelter in the narrator's house. Once he has warmed himself by the fire he begins to play: Tune followed tune, till at last Ned struck up The Tuning of the Colours, which delighted us, for the air is a beautiful minor one, and he played it well. I was then only 11 years old, and, of course, could not write music; but he played it over and over till the shapes I built grew soft and concealed everything that I now discover in imagination. (214)
Source for notated version: "Taken down from Ned Goggin, the professional fiddler of Glenosheen Co. Limerick, about 1848" (Joyce). Joyce collected a number of tunes and airs from Goggin in his home area of Limerick around the time of the Great Famine; he was one of Joyce's primary informants in the years 1844-50, and Joyce knew him from childhood.
Printed sources: Joyce (Old Irish Folk Music and Song), 1909; No. 17, p. 11. Miller (Fiddler's Throne), 2004; No. 70, p. 52.
Recorded sources: Shanachie 79054, Kevin Carroll & Liz Carroll - "Fathers and Daughters" (1985).
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