Hangman's Reel: A Song History

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The old-time fiddle tune "Hangman's Reel" shares its name with "Reel du pendu," literally "reel of the hanged man," a reel widely known among French-Canadian fiddlers and counted among the showpieces of their repertoire. A story comes with the Quebec tune, told in several versions. All of them involve a condemned man who is offered his life in return for a musical feat. In one, he is handed a fiddle that is out of tune and plays a tune no one has heard before. In another, told by the Quebec fiddler Louis Boudreault, the prisoner, sometimes said to have had no musical training, must come up with a reel on an untuned fiddle before dawn to win his pardon, and this is the reel he made.[1] A Châteauguay town history of the fiddler Joseph Allard repeats the tale and places the tune's supposed composition more than two hundred years back.[2] It should be read as legend. The tune's real origins are unclear. The fiddle researcher Lisa Ornstein could find no source for it in the music of France, and the earliest Quebec mention she found was in the agronomist Georges Bouchard's account of his late nineteenth-century childhood in Saint-Philippe-de-Néri, in the Kamouraska region.[1]

Colored 1902 postcard of two men in a canoe on a lake in rural Quebec

Detroit Photographic Co., Habitants of the Province of Quebec, postcard, 1902. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Rural Quebec at the turn of the century, home of the “Reel du pendu”; the card is not about the tune.

The story fits the music. The fiddle is retuned, usually to A-E-A-C#. Ornstein describes the form as a core melody and then a series of brief arpeggio-based strains that step down from the high octave to the low one, and many players also pluck the open strings with the left hand.[1] Among the earliest recordings are those of two Quebec fiddlers: Joseph Allard, who recorded it for Victor in 1928, and Isidore Soucy, who recorded it five times on 78s between 1927 and 1952.[1] A history published by the town of Châteauguay calls Allard's 1928 recording the oldest known version and the one still most played.[2] Because the Traditional Tune Archive dates Soucy's recordings from 1927, however, the sources consulted do not settle which fiddler was first.[1] Allard also taught the young Jean Carignan from 1927 to 1931,[3] and Carignan's recording, with Pete Seeger on banjo, appeared on the Folkways album Old Time Fiddle Tunes Played by Jean Carignan in 1960.[4]

The American "Hangman's Reel" is played in the same A tunings, A-E-A-E or A-E-A-C#. Where it came from is debated. The fiddler Albert Hash thought it was originally from the British Isles, although the Traditional Tune Archive considers the style unlikely for that. Judy Hyman of the Horseflies thinks it began as "Reel du pendu" and took on its Southern old-time character in the hands of a younger generation of upstate New York fiddlers. According to Hash's nephew, Hash himself learned it from a 1968 recording by the Texas fiddler Bill Northcutt, and John McCutcheon recorded it in 1977.[5] It is now a favorite of younger old-time fiddlers and is often heard at square dances,[5] and it has reached the mountain dulcimer as well, appearing in Stephen Seifert's jam book Join the Jam.[6]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Reel du pendu".
  2. Ville de Châteauguay: "Joseph Allard".
  3. The Canadian Encyclopedia: "Joseph Allard".
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "Reel of the Hanged One (Reel du pendu)" (Jean Carignan).
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Hangman's Reel".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".