Liverpool Hornpipe: A Song History

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The "Liverpool Hornpipe" is a traditional hornpipe, most often played in D major, for which none of the sources consulted here names a composer.[1][2] The Traditional Tune Archive traces it across the United States, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and Cape Breton, under a string of other names that includes "Tom Jolly's Hornpipe" and "Louisville Hornpipe."[1] The oldest copy the Archive's editor has found is in the 1823–26 manuscript of Joshua Gibbons of Tealby, Lincolnshire, where it is called "London Hornpipe," and the tune was in print around 1826 in Alexander's Fifty New Scotch and Irish Reels and Hornpipes.[1] Elias Howe printed it in his Second Part of the Musician's Companion in 1843, and in London, Henry Mayhew's interviews for London Labour and the London Poor include a London street-organ player who names it among the pieces he played.[1] Opinions of it vary: the Irish musicologist Father Henebry dismissed it for its "purposeless vapidity," while Caoimhin Mac Aoidh says Irish players mostly think of it as belonging to fiddlers.[1]

Etching of tall ship masts and rigging at a busy dockside

James McNeill Whistler, Shipping at Liverpool, etching and drypoint, 1867. Ships at Liverpool, shown for the port in the tune's name; it has no connection to the tune.

The earliest recording Irishtune.info lists is a 1915 performance by the accordionist John J. Kimmel, which the Archive identifies as Columbia A1977.[1][2] The Archive also finds it in a list of Ozark fiddle tunes Vance Randolph published in 1954 and in the repertoire of Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham, and treats two pieces Montreal fiddler Joseph Allard recorded for Victor in 1933 as versions of it.[1] In Irish sessions it is often played in sets with tunes such as "The Rights of Man" and "The Red-Haired Boy," according to Irishtune.info.[2] A different Pennsylvania tune of the same name, printed in Samuel Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle (1981), is unrelated to it.[3] A "Liverpool Hornpipe" appears in Larry Conger's Flat-Picked Fiddle Tunes, a 36-page Fingers Of Steel book of 31 tunes, all in DAD tuning, with each also supplied as its own PDF file.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Liverpool Hornpipe"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Liverpool Hornpipe (1)".
  2. Irishtune.info: "Liverpool Hornpipe".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Liverpool Hornpipe (2)".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Flat-Picked Fiddle Tunes".
  5. Image: James McNeill Whistler, Shipping at Liverpool, etching and drypoint, 1867. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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