Merrily Kissed The Quaker's Wife: A Song History
This tune has travelled under a cluster of related names. The Traditional Tune Archive files its Scottish and English form as a 6/8 jig called "Merrily Danced the Quaker," also known as "Quaker's Wife" and "So Merrily Danc'd the Quaker," set in G or D depending on the source[1]. Irish musicians know it as "Merrily Kiss the Quaker" or "Merrily Kissed the Quaker's Wife" and play it as a slide, generally in G and often in three parts[2][3]. Alan Ng's irishtune.info gives an Irish-language title, "Póg Bean an Chaecair go Meidhreach," for a related setting[4]. The Tune Archive judges the melody "most likely of Scottish origin"[2].
The Fair Quaker, mezzotint by an anonymous British artist, published July 11, 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.
Its printed history reaches back into the eighteenth century, though the Tune Archive's own pages disagree about the earliest source. One reports that John Glen (1891) placed its first appearance in Robert Bremner's collection of Scots reels, there titled "Merrily dance the Quaker" and dated 1757 (the same page elsewhere gives 1760), but adds that a London collection of 1750 printed it earlier[1]. The other says a version under a different title appeared in a Dublin collection issued by John and William Neale in 1724, and that it was entered as "Quaker's Wife" in the 1770 manuscript of the Northumbrian musician William Vickers[2]. The tune also crossed the Atlantic early. According to the Tune Archive it was well known in America around the War of Independence, served as a quick march as well as a dance tune, and was included in Captain Robert Hinde's collection of quick marches; the same page counts American mechanical clocks, among them several made by Leslie and Williams of Trenton, New Jersey, at the end of the eighteenth century, as its earliest "recordings"[1]. Chambers' Scottish Songs (1829) printed a verse to be sung to the air[1].
In Ireland the Tune Archive associates the tune with West Kerry, and cites the Boys of the Lough for the view that the slide as a dance belongs chiefly to the southwest, especially west Clare, Cork and Kerry[2]. Irishtune.info indexes two distinct but related slides under this name, and the earliest recordings it lists for each date from the early 1970s: accordionist Tony MacMahon's self-titled album and Planxty's first album, with Liam O'Flynn on uilleann pipes, for one, and Chieftains 3 for the other[3][4]. Later entries include an album of music for set dancing and recordings by céilí bands[3].
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