Morpeth Rant: A Song History
"Morpeth Rant" takes its name from Morpeth, a market town in Northumberland, and was also the name of a dance that the Traditional Tune Archive says has been performed for close to two hundred years; so many melodies accompanied that dance that several different tunes now carry the title.[1] The tune in common use is often credited to William Shield (1748–1829), a composer from Swalwell near Gateshead.[1] Shield made his name writing for the London stage, chiefly at Covent Garden, and was appointed Master of the King's Music in 1817.[2] The Archive, following the folk-music researcher Barry Callaghan, treats the credit with caution: Shield often reworked traditional melodies, so this one may not be his own.[1]
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Liber Studiorum: Morpeth North, etching and mezzotint, early 19th century. Turner's view of Morpeth, the Northumberland town that gives the tune its name.
The Archive's printed sources for the tune go back to dance collections of the 1790s, and the title appears in Henry Robson's list of well-known Northumbrian song and dance tunes in The Northern Minstrel's Budget, published around 1800.[1] An older form of the tune survives in manuscript collections such as those of Joshua Jackson in north Yorkshire (1798) and C. J. Surtees on Tyneside (1819), and the Archive also cites versions from Nova Scotia, New England and Texas.[1] Callaghan suggests that the version most often heard today, with a newer second strain, may go back to a late nineteenth-century printing by Kerr under the plain heading "Hornpipe," and that the English Folk Dance and Song Society's Community Dance Manual No. 1 (1949) and later recordings, such as Jack Armstrong's in 1950, helped fix it.[1] A separate, older version in B flat, sometimes called "Old Morpeth Rant," keeps much the same first strain but a different second one.[3]
The Archive lists recordings by Alister Anderson and by the Northumberland fiddler Jim Rutherford, and on the American side by John McCutcheon, on his 1977 album The Wind That Shakes the Barley, later reissued as hammered dulcimer music, and by Allan Block with Ralph Lee Smith.[1] Phyllis Gaskins puts it among the D tunes, with the keynote at the open fret and every string tuned to D, in Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a Fingers Of Steel book that pairs Galax-style arrangements with the instrument's history, its construction and some of the players who defined the style.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Morpeth Rant (1)".
- Northumbria University Research Portal: "William Shield's A Collection of Favourite Songs (c. 1775)".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Morpeth Rant (2)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
- Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Liber Studiorum: Morpeth North, etching and mezzotint, early 19th century. The Cleveland Museum of Art.