Dick's Maggot: A Song History
"Dick's Maggot" is an English country-dance tune in G major, a triple hornpipe in 3/2 time.[1] Among its older meanings, the word "maggot" could stand for a fancy or whim,[1] a sense that dictionaries now label archaic.[2] The sources consulted here do not say who Dick was.[1]
William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, Plate 2, engraving; third state of three, March 5, 1753. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
Henry Playford first printed the tune, as the music for a longways dance, in the supplement to the eleventh edition of The Dancing Master (London, 1702).[1] His twelfth edition followed in 1703,[3] and the tune stayed in every later edition through the eighteenth and last, issued in 1728 by Playford's successor John Young.[1] Young also printed it in 1710 under the name "Duble the Cape," and John Walsh gave both dance and tune in his Compleat Country Dancing-Master in 1718, 1731 and 1754.[1]
Cecil Sharp included it in his Country Dance Tunes of 1909, and the composer Ernest Tomlinson chose it as one of six traditional melodies for his First Suite of English Folk Dances.[1] It has been recorded on albums such as Bare Necessities' English Country Dances (1987) and Brass Monkey's Flame of Fire (2004).[1] Mark Gilston includes it in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2, a collection of his dulcimer arrangements of old English dance tunes.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Dick's Maggot".
- Dictionary.com: "Maggot".
- IMSLP: "The Dancing Master (Playford, John)".
- Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2".
- Image: William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, Plate 2, engraving; third state of three, March 5, 1753. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.