Cuckoo's Nest: A Song History

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"Cuckoo's Nest" is a name shared by more than one song and tune, as Dave Arthur pointed out in his notes to the 2002 album Return Journey.[1] One of them is a hornpipe that the Traditional Tune Archive calls "an extremely popular English melody," found across the British Isles and British North America.[2] Among the earliest dated copies the archive cites are the 1777 manuscript collection of Giles Gibbs of New Windsor, Connecticut, and the first volume of James Aird's Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (1782).[2] Matt Seattle has suggested that it started out as a Scots Measure under a different title, though that is his own reading of the evidence.[2] The title itself carried a bawdy double meaning, and James Hogg printed a song set to the tune in his Jacobite Relics (1819).[2]

Japanese woodblock print of a cuckoo flying under a crescent moon above masts and moored boats at a harbor

Utagawa Hiroshige, The Year's First Song of the Cuckoo at Tsukudajima, woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 1831. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

Irish players also call the hornpipe An Spealadóir ("The Mower"), and Francis O'Neill printed two settings in his Music of Ireland (1903).[2] The pipers Willie Clancy and Seamus Ennis are among the Irish musicians who recorded it.[3] In England the name also belongs to the Cotswold morris repertoire: John Kirkpatrick recorded a Longborough "Cuckoo's Nest" on Plain Capers, his 1976 album of Cotswold morris tunes.[1] Robert Kenworthy Schofield noted a tune of the name from Charles Benfield at Bledington on 1 September 1924, and versions have also been found at Bucknell, Ilmington, Longborough and Sherborne.[4]

In North America the hornpipe is still a favorite at New England contra dances, and it appears on the folklorist Vance Randolph's 1954 list of Ozark fiddle tunes.[2] Some American fiddlers reshaped it as a reel: Samuel Bayard noted one such setting from the western Pennsylvania fiddler Irvin Yaugher Jr. in 1943 and published it in Hill Country Tunes (1944), and the archive links it to a related version by the eastern Kentucky fiddler Ed Haley and a very similar one recorded in the field in 1973 from Glen Smith of Wirt County, West Virginia.[5] Butch Ross includes "Cuckoo's Nest" in 13 Great Tunes That (Almost) Nobody Plays, a collection of lesser-played tunes in DAD tuning.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Cuckoo's Nest"

Sources

  1. Mainly Norfolk: "Cuckoo's Nest".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cuckoo's Nest (4) (The)".
  3. irishtune.info: "Cuckoo's Nest".
  4. GlosTrad: "Cuckoo's Nest".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Cuckoo's Nest (6) (The)".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Butch Ross, 13 Great Tunes That (Almost) Nobody Plays".
  7. Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, The Year's First Song of the Cuckoo at Tsukudajima, woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 1831. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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