Off She Goes: A Song History
"Off She Goes" is a 6/8 jig long popular in Ireland, Britain and North America, yet its composer and date of composition are unknown.[1] Some have credited it to George Macfarren and others to the Irish piper "Piper" Jackson, but Bayard, in a 1981 study cited by the Traditional Tune Archive, ruled out Macfarren because the tune was already circulating in his childhood, and judged Jackson unlikely because the melody resembles neither his other tunes nor Irish music generally; Bayard also doubted it was older than the 1780s.[1] Early appearances include an Irish manuscript, the Murphy MS, and a collection printed in 1799 by Thomas Calvert of Kelso, Scotland.[1] London publishers soon took it up: it appears in Henry Thompson's Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1805, whose title promises figures for each dance, and in Thomas Wilson's ballroom companions of 1808 and 1816.[1][2] It was known early in America too: Ann Winnington, a keyboard player who lived in New York, copied it into her manuscript book about 1810, and it was printed in New York in the 1810s in Edward Riley's Flute Melodies.[1]
Walter Shirlaw, The Country Dance, black chalk, gouache, watercolor and charcoal. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its dancing; it has no documented link to this tune.
Through the 19th century, English musicians copied it into their tune books, among them Joshua Gibbons of Lincolnshire, the poet John Clare, Joseph Kershaw, and the Hardy family; Irish collectors printed it as well, from R. M. Levey (1858) to Francis O'Neill (1903, 1907).[1] Recordings made in 1959 and 1962 at Walter and Daisy Bulwer's cottage in Shipdham, Norfolk, sessions that also captured the dulcimer player Billy Cooper, include two versions of the tune, one for solo fiddle and one for a small band.[1][3] It is also heard from the Sliabh Luachra accordion player Johnny O'Leary on the Topic album Music for the Set (1977).[1] In New England it has stayed with fiddlers, appearing in Miller and Perron's New England Fiddler's Repertoire (1983) and on Everett Dwyer's New England Traditional Fiddling (1978).[1] In Donegal, Grace Orpen's The Dances of Donegal (1939) gives it as the tune for a dance called the Berlin Polky.[1]
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