Fisher's Hornpipe: A Song History

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"Fisher's Hornpipe" is an English dance tune of the 1770s. According to the dance historians Joy Van Cleef and Kate Van Winkle Keller, it was probably written by James A. Fishar, the musical director and ballet master at London's Covent Garden theatre. It was printed in his Sixteen Cotillons Sixteen Minuets Twelve Allemands and Twelve Hornpipes, published by John Rutherford around 1778.[1] Not everyone agrees. The Traditional Tune Archive notes that others have credited the German composer Johann Christian Fischer or the English violinist John Abraham Fisher, and that the tune also circulated under other names, such as "Lord Howe's Hornpipe."[2]

1889 color lithograph trade card titled Sailor's Hornpipe: a young dancer in a sailor suit doing a hornpipe step

Kinney Brothers Tobacco Co., Sailor’s Hornpipe, from the National Dances card series, color lithograph, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A hornpipe dancer as pictured in the 1880s; the card is not about this particular tune.

The tune crossed the Atlantic almost at once. The American John Greenwood copied it into his music book around 1783, and a country dance set to it was printed in John Griffith's Collection (Providence, 1788). It then turned up in nearly every dance collection that followed.[1] Many early printings put it in F major, but a Philadelphia collection of 1796 already had it in D, as did several American fiddlers' manuscripts of the early 1800s.[2] The Tune Archive also passes on an early frontier account: when the surveyors led by Moses Cleaveland, the man Cleveland, Ohio, is named for, made their first camp beside the Cuyahoga River, a fiddler in the party played it for an improvised dance that night.[2] It reached records early, too. Leopold Moeslein included it in a violin medley on an Edison cylinder issued in 1906,[3] and the string band the Hill Billies recorded it for Vocalion in 1926.[4]

Fiddle contests adopted it early. It was one of the category tunes at a fiddlers' contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, in 1899, and Louie Attebery, writing in 1979, counted it among the standard tunes of many fiddlers at the annual contest in Weiser, Idaho.[2] Stephen Seifert includes it in Join the Jam, his collection of 75 tunes from the mountain dulcimer jam tradition.[5] Dulcimer players often take it in F, and sometimes in D or G.[6] Dulcimer Jambalaya, a blog about the Lagniappe Dulcimer Society's players, cautions that at full speed it is hard to keep a big jam together on it, though it works well as a duet or small-band piece.[6]

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Sources

  1. Colonial Society of Massachusetts: "Selected American Country Dances and Their English Sources" (Joy Van Cleef & Kate Van Winkle Keller).
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Fisher's Hornpipe".
  3. Calisphere / UC Santa Barbara Library Cylinder Audio Archive: "Fisher's hornpipe medley".
  4. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "Fisher's Hornpipe; Blue Eyed Girl".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".
  6. Dulcimer Jambalaya (Lagniappe Dulcimer Society blog): "Fisher's Hornpipe — Somewhere in the Middle".