> The up tempo feel of The Girl I Left Behind Me (known as Brighton Camp > around here, I live ten miles from Brighton) is anticipation - > And if the night be ever so dark > Or ever so wet and windy > I must return to the Brighton Camp > And the girl I left behind me. > Adjust windy to rhyme. That was the pronunciation in Shakespeares time.
It's a good bit later than that - Seven Years War, I think. See Lewis Winstock, "Songs and Music of the Redcoats", for the story. OED says the modern pronunciation of "wind" dates to the eighteenth century, which would fit. > King of the Fairies English?! I thought it was Irish, but it's a variant of an older tune, "Gilderoy", which is first documented from Scotland but could equally well be English. There are stacks of variants in the same family: "The Cuckoo's Nest" (a.k.a. "Come Ashore Jolly Tar With Your Trousers On") is another one, which if I remember right is traceable back to Elizabethan England. More recent ones are "Dinky's Reel" and "Loch Torridon". > I played this last night along with about twenty other people in a > warm friendly pub and I still felt shivers down my spine. This is > a tune you do not play at midnight in a churchyard under a full moon > for fear of who (or what) you might summon up. I'd never thought of it like that (usually played pretty fast round here); it's a conception that adds quite a bit to the tune. Will try playing it slower and more reflectively in future. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
