Jockey To The Fair: A Song History

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"Jockey to the Fair" is an English tune that the Traditional Tune Archive dates to at least the middle of the eighteenth century and describes as popular throughout England, serving for marching as well as dancing.[1] Its earliest printings listed there are T. Straight's 24 Favourite Dances for 1779, where it is titled "General Action," and Skillern's Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1780; the Archive also notes that one version served the British army as a march around the time of the American Revolution.[1] A song shares the name: Jockey, dressed in his best, rouses Jenny at her window and the pair slip away to the fair and marry, and the Traditional Ballad Index notes that its words can be sung to the fiddle tune.[2] Texts titled "Jockey to the Fair" turn up in about ten American songsters printed between 1788 and 1800, and the song lasted long enough in tradition to be collected in Canada's Maritime provinces, with a text also held in I. G. Greer's folksong collection, gathered chiefly in Ashe, Wilkes and Watauga counties.[3][2][4] Thomas Hardy gave the tune a part in Far from the Madding Crowd, where the shepherd Gabriel Oak, out of work at the Casterbridge hiring fair, takes out his flute and plays it.[5]

Watercolor of riders leading a herd of horses home from a fair

Rosa Bonheur, Return from the Horse Fair, watercolor and gouache, 1873. Horses and riders coming home from a fair, shown for the tune's title; it has no connection to the tune.

The tune is found in many Cotswold morris traditions: the Archive reports versions collected from Adderbury, Ascot-under-Wychwood, Bampton, Bledington, Brackley, Ducklington, Headington, Longborough and Sherborne.[1] The Morris Ring's account of Bampton, whose Whit Monday dancing Lionel Bacon called "a living tradition," includes it as a jig in that village's repertoire.[6] In Ireland it became a solo set dance, An marcach chuig an aonach, danced in both traditional and modern forms and approved for Munster competitions, and it appears as "The Jockey at the Fair" in O'Neill's Music of Ireland (1903) and Dance Music of Ireland (1907).[1] Mark Gilston's Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2, a sheet-music book that is the second of his two-volume Irish set, includes the tune, with everything arranged for solo mountain dulcimer tuned DAD.[7]

Our book that contains the song "Jockey To The Fair"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Jockey to the Fair (1)" (annotation).
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Jockey to the Fair".
  3. Country Dance and Song Society, Early American Songsters (Robert M. Keller): "Text Index - JO".
  4. Appalachian State University, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection: "Jockey to the Fair" (I. G. Greer Folksong Collection).
  5. Project Gutenberg: "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy.
  6. The Morris Ring: "Bampton".
  7. Mark Gilston: "Irish Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 2".
  8. Image: Rosa Bonheur, Return from the Horse Fair, watercolor and gouache, 1873. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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