Lamplighter's Hornpipe: A Song History

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"Lamplighter's Hornpipe" is a fiddle hornpipe, usually in A major, whose origin no one has pinned down; the Traditional Tune Archive leans toward an American beginning and ties it above all to New England fiddling.[1] Early manuscript copies titled "Lamplighters" turn up in Massachusetts: in Elisha Belknap's music copybook from Framingham, dated 1784 though the tune may have been entered around 1800, and in a Woburn fife collection with entries from 1807 to about 1840.[1] Bronner, in his 1987 book Old-Time Music Makers of New York State, read the tune's features the other way, as signs of an eighteenth-century British Isles source.[1]

Night street scene with a lamplighter at a street lamp in front of a row of houses

William P. Chappel, The Lamp Lighter, oil on slate paper, 1870s. An American lamplighter of the 1870s, shown for the tune's title; it has no connection to the tune.

Elias Howe of Boston had it in print by 1843, and it reappeared in Bruce and Emmett's Civil War Drummers' and Fifers' Guide (1862) and Ryan's Mammoth Collection (1883).[1] A country dance of the same name appears in Howe's Ball-Room Hand Book (1858), and Francis O'Neill's "Merry Soldier" (1903) is nearly the same tune, probably borrowed from Howe or Ryan.[1] Elizabeth Burchenal set New England contra dances to it in American Country-Dances (1918), where a second, different melody also appears under the title, with "Handorgan Hornpipe" as its alternative name.[1][2] On 3 April 1918 she supervised a Victor Military Band recording of "Lamplighter's Hornpipe" in Camden, New Jersey, in her own arrangement, its label crediting the book.[3]

Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham, described by the Tune Archive as Henry Ford's champion fiddler in the mid-1920s, included it in his 1926 tune book, and the Québec fiddler Arthur J. Boulay recorded it in 1929 as "Reel à quatre."[1] Later recordings include Rodney Miller's 1980 album New England Chestnuts and a 1994 Don Messer compilation.[1] A piece of this title, in DAD tuning, is one of the 31 tunes in Larry Conger's Flat-Picked Fiddle Tunes, a 36-page Fingers Of Steel book whose download also gives each tune as a separate PDF; the listing does not say which of the melodies called "Lamplighter's Hornpipe" it is.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Lamplighter's Hornpipe"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Lamplighter's Hornpipe (1)".
  2. Internet Archive: "American Country-Dances, Volume I" (Elizabeth Burchenal, 1918).
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-21658. Lamplighter's hornpipe / Victor Military Band".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Flat-Picked Fiddle Tunes".
  5. Image: William P. Chappel, The Lamp Lighter, oil on slate paper, 1870s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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