Argeers: A Song History

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“Argeers” is one of the dances in the first edition of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, with its tune printed alongside.^[1] The book was a London collection of country dances, each with its own melody, and the title page of that first edition carries the date 1651.^[2] Sources differ on the year, however: the Library of Congress catalogs it as “1651 [i.e. 1650],” and Cecil Sharp gave 1650.^[3]^[4] In later editions the title kept changing, and the 1657 and 1665 editions spell it “Argeres.”^[5] From 1670 to 1679 it appears as “Argeres, or The Wedding night.”^[5] The 1686 and 1690 editions print it as “Argiers, or The Wedding-night.”^[5]

Etching of country people dancing outdoors beneath tall trees

Claude Lorrain, The Country Dance, etching, ca. 1637. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A country dance from shortly before Playford’s first edition, shown for its subject; it has no connection to this dance.

In 1939 Evelyn Wells suggested that the name might be a garbled form of “Algiers,” and the Traditional Tune Archive, which reports her suggestion, considers it possible, pointing out that seventeenth-century English writers, Shakespeare among them, spelled the North African name “Argier” or “Argiers,” and that Algiers was then linked with the Barbary pirates.^[1] None of the sources consulted here says why the dance was given this name, so the Algiers reading remains a suggestion rather than a documented fact.^[1]

Cecil Sharp and George Butterworth published their interpretation of the dance in Part III of The Country Dance Book (1912), where it is set for two couples, “for four; in three parts.”^[4] The Playford Ball (1990), a collection of early country dances as Sharp and his followers interpreted them, includes a version that follows Sharp’s closely, and Bare Necessities recorded music for it on their album At Home.^[6]^[7] Other recordings of the tune include Hesperus’s Early American Roots (1997) and The Queen’s Delight (2020) by Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien.^[1]

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