Quindaro Hornpipe: A Song History
"Quindaro Hornpipe" is a hornpipe in G major that the Traditional Tune Archive classes as American, English and Scottish and associates with New England; most versions have two strains, each played twice.[1] The Archive gives its earliest known version as "Richard's Hornpipe" in W. Blackman's London collection A Selection of the Most Favorite Hornpipes for the Violin, dated about 1810 to 1822, and reports that the Seattle researcher Vivian Williams found a slightly different setting called "Fanny's Delight" in Saunders School for the Violin, published at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1847.[1] The Archive also lists it in Elias Howe's Musician's Omnibus No. 1, which it dates to 1863.[2]
Pavel Petrovich Svinin, Steamboat Travel on the Hudson River, watercolor and gouache on white wove paper, 1811–ca. 1813. A Hudson River steamboat of the same era rather than one on the Missouri.
According to the Archive, the New York City writer, researcher and musician Don Meade ties the name to a Kansas town founded by abolitionists and later abandoned.[1] Quindaro stood on the south bank of the Missouri River, in what is now Kansas City, Kansas, and took its name from Nancy Quindaro Brown Guthrie, a Wyandot woman whose husband, Abelard Guthrie, was the town company's chief promoter.[3] Ground was broken on New Year's Day 1857, and the town was meant to be a landing for Free-State settlers entering Kansas Territory.[4] Its riverside location suited it to helping enslaved people reach freedom, and the women's rights advocate Clarina Nichols, an associate editor of the abolitionist Quindaro Chindowan, later recalled hiding a woman fleeing slavery in her home there.[3] The Panic of 1857, competition from nearby Wyandotte City and the Civil War drained the town, and the state legislature revoked its charter in the winter of 1862.[4]
It appears in Burchenal's American Country Dances (1918) as the tune for the dance "Boston Fancy," and the Archive lists its genre as contra.[1][2] Mark Gilston includes it in More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a sheet-music collection of old-time American tunes that Gilston publishes himself.[5]
Browse more tunes like this: Old-Time & Fiddle Tunes Dulcimer Tab
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Quindaro Hornpipe".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Quindaro Hornpipe".
- Kansas Historical Society, Kansapedia: "Quindaro".
- Kansas City Public Library, Civil War on the Western Border: "Quindaro, Kansas".
- Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Pavel Petrovich Svinin, Steamboat Travel on the Hudson River, watercolor and gouache on white wove paper, 1811–ca. 1813. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.