Nobody's Jigg: A Song History

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"Nobody's Jigg" is an English country dance tune that John Playford printed in a supplement to the sixth edition of The Dancing Master in 1679, and it was kept in the book's later editions up to 1728.[1][2] Despite the name, it is a tune in duple time; in the seventeenth century, the Tune Archive explains, "jig" could stand for any brisk dance tune, not specifically the 6/8 form the word now suggests.[1] Playford's dance is a longways one for couples in twos: the lines fall back and come together, the four dancers go halfway round and back, and then the first and second couples take turns crossing and leading through the set.[3]

Etching of the Thames with boats and the London skyline seen from a riverside stair

Wenceslaus Hollar, London Viewed from the Milford Stairs, etching, 1643–44. London a generation before the dance appeared in print, shown for its century; it has no connection to the tune.

The title probably borrows a stock character: the Traditional Tune Archive, drawing on the musicologist John M. Ward, notes that the street literature sold in Elizabethan London featured "Nobody" again and again, often drawn with breeches reaching up to his neck, and that he was one of the two title figures of the play No-body and Some-body, which English actors took on tour abroad.[1] Ward treats the melody as one branch of the "Staines Morris" tune family, with "Kemp's Morris" as another.[1] The Walsh publishing house printed the tune with dance directions in The Compleat Country Dancing Master (1718), and in the twentieth century it appeared as "My Lady Winwood's Maggot" in Karpeles and Schofield's A Selection of 100 English Folk Dance Airs (1951).[1] Early-music players have taken it up: the ensemble Les Witches took the tune's name as the title of an album of seventeenth-century dances, recorded in 2001, and Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien recorded it on The Queen's Delight (2020).[4][1] On the dulcimer, Mark Gilston arranges it in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2, one of two volumes of old English dance tunes for mountain dulcimer, published by Gilston and sold as a ZIP file holding both the complete book and a separate PDF for each piece.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Nobody's Jigg"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Nobody's Jig".
  2. barndances.org.uk: "Nobody's Jigg".
  3. Playford's Dancing Master: The Compleat Dance Guide: "Nobody's Jig".
  4. MusicWeb International: "Nobody's Jig: 17th Century Dances from the British Isles" (review by Glyn Pursglove).
  5. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 2".
  6. Image: Wenceslaus Hollar, London Viewed from the Milford Stairs, etching, 1643–44. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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