Grimstock: A Song History

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"Grimstock" is an English country dance tune in 6/8 time that John Playford printed in the first edition of The English Dancing Master.[1] That edition was printed in London by Thomas Harper for Playford and bears the date 1651.[2] Britannica gives 1650 as the year the book came out, even though it is dated 1651, and says it first held 104 dances, each with its tune.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive suggests the melody is older still, pointing to an apparent sixteenth-century lute version and to a printing of its first strain in Michael Praetorius's Terpsichore of 1612.[1] The archive also mentions a Romano-British temple site called Grimstock Hill near Coleshill in the West Midlands, but says it is not known whether the place has any connection to the tune.[1]

Painting of children dancing outdoors while a seated man plays a pipe and villagers look on

Circle of Le Nain, Peasant Children Dancing, oil on canvas, 1650s. A French dance scene from the decade the tune was printed; it has no connection to it.

Playford set Grimstock as a dance in three parts for three couples, which he headed "Longwayes for six."[4] According to the Traditional Tune Archive, the tune stayed in the book through its eighth edition of 1690.[1] When Cecil Sharp turned to Playford's dances in the early twentieth century, he included Grimstock among the thirty dances in Part II of The Country Dance Book, working from the 1652 second edition, and he also printed the melody in Set 3 of his Country Dance Tunes.[5][6] Sharp likened one of its figures to the sword-dance figure called the Roll.[5] In the same book he praised the "beautiful and characteristically English folk-airs" of Playford's collection, adding that, as far as he knew, no edition of it was then easy for musicians to find.[5]

Grimstock reappeared in several tune collections of the 1980s.[1] The King's Noyse recorded it for The King's Delight, which Harmonia Mundi lists as released in February 1994.[7] Mark Gilston, whom the book's listing describes as an ethnomusicologist and national dulcimer champion, includes it in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2, a collection of dulcimer arrangements of old English dance tunes published by Gilston himself.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Grimstock"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Grimstock".
  2. IMSLP: "The Dancing Master (Playford, John)".
  3. Britannica: "John Playford".
  4. University of Waterloo (Eric Praetzel's transcription): "The English Dancing Master (1651)".
  5. Library of Dance: "Cecil J. Sharp, The Country Dance Book, Part II (2nd ed., 1913)".
  6. IMSLP: "Country Dance Tunes (Sharp, Cecil)".
  7. Harmonia Mundi: "The King's Delight".
  8. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2".
  9. Image: Circle of Le Nain, Peasant Children Dancing, oil on canvas, 1650s. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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