Drops Of Brandy: A Song History

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"Drops of Brandy" is a slip jig in 9/8 time, known in Ireland, Scotland and England and most often set in G; its first home is uncertain.[1] The oldest source the Traditional Tune Archive lists is a manuscript of country dances that David Young wrote out for the Duke of Perth in 1734, now known as the Drummond Castle manuscript, and Young included the tune again, as "Dribbles of Brandy," in his MacFarlane manuscript of about 1741.[1] London printers soon picked it up, in Daniel Wright's Compleat Collection of 1740 and in volume three of Walsh's Compleat Country Dancing-Master in 1747, and it later turns up in the manuscripts of English musicians such as Joshua Gibbons of Lincolnshire and Ellis Knowles of Lancashire.[1]

Photograph of a cut-glass decanter with ringed neck and a mushroom stopper

Brandy Decanter, cut blown glass, 19th century (?). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The tune has long been tied to dancing. Francis O'Neill, who printed it in his 1907 Dance Music of Ireland, later wrote that a special dance was performed to it, and in Ireland it is a favorite for solo step-dance competitions; in Scotland the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society treats it as the "official" tune for "Strip the Willow."[1] The archive also cites Lederman's article in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, which counts it among the two chief tunes of the Canadian fur-trade repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and links it to a Scottish line dance of the same name.[1]

The twenty recordings listed at irishtune.info begin with John McKenna around 1923 and Séamus Ennis in 1940, and run through the Chieftains' Water from the Well (2000) and later albums.[2] The same site places it fourteenth among its top twenty session slip jigs, ranked by how many members play it.[3] Mark Gilston includes it in Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, a collection of Irish melodies arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Drops Of Brandy"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Drops of Brandy (1)".
  2. irishtune.info: "Drops of Brandy".
  3. irishtune.info: "Top Session Slip Jigs".
  4. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
  5. Image: Brandy Decanter, cut blown glass, 19th century (?). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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