Dick Gossip's Reel: A Song History
"Dick Gossip's" is an Irish reel in D major with two parts, which players sometimes take in the opposite order.[1][2] Besides "Dick Gossip" and "Dicky Gossip's," it circulates as "The Castle" or "The Castle Reel," and the Traditional Tune Archive also lists "The First Cup."[1][2] The name is surrounded by legend: the Paddy O'Brien tune collection says it honors a famous highwayman, and the Tune Archive describes him as a reputed eighteenth-century rapparee of the South Tyrone and Fermanagh area, yet its annotator could find no record of such a man and suggests instead that "Dick Gossip" was a nineteenth-century expression for a talkative man, citing an 1820 use in Henry Hunt's memoirs.[2]
Folk Violin, wood, late 19th century. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Fiddler Caoimhín Mac Aoidh reported finding it under this title in the Gunn manuscript, a single-copy collection of tunes gathered from fiddlers around Hare Island in Lough Erne toward the end of the 1800s and kept by the family of Belfast fiddler Ben Gunn.[2] In print it appeared in Bulmer and Sharpley's Music from Ireland (1974), from fiddler Pat Neilly, and in Eamonn Jordan's Whistle and Sing (1975).[2] Fiddler Jimmy Power's recording as "The Castle" is included on the Globestyle anthology In the Smoke,[1][3] and the Battlefield Band (1981), L. E. McCullough with Liz Carroll (1984, as "The Castle Reel") and Wild Asparagus (1990) all recorded it.[2]
It is still widely played; more than 180 members of irishtune.info list it among the tunes they know.[1] Aaron O'Rourke includes it in Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1, a collection of 36 jigs, reels and polkas for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]
Sources
- irishtune.info: "Dick Gossip's".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Dick Gossip's".
- irishtune.info: "In the Smoke".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 1".
- Image: Folk Violin, wood, late 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.