Rights Of Man: A Song History
“The Rights of Man” is a hornpipe, most often played in E minor, in two repeated strains.[1] Its name matches that of Thomas Paine’s two-part defence of the French Revolution, published in 1791 and 1792 as an answer to Edmund Burke.[2] The Traditional Tune Archive discusses Paine’s book alongside the tune, yet in the sources consulted here no one documents when or why the hornpipe acquired the title.[1] The Northumbrian fiddler and composer James Hill is occasionally named as its composer, a credit the Archive traces to a single older collection and considers doubtful.[1]
J. Sharp, Union Pipe, wood, velvet, leather, cloth, ivory and metal, Aberdeen, early 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.
The earliest printing listed by the Tune Archive is in Middleton’s Selection of Strathspeys, Reels &c. for the Violin (1870), which it credits to Milne, and at least three more printings followed before 1900.[1] Its home ground is disputed: one writer found it popular in both Scotland and Ireland, while others, Francis O’Neill among them, regarded it as Irish.[1] O’Neill printed it as No. 811 of The Dance Music of Ireland (1907), which is also the oldest source in irishtune.info’s index, a list that concentrates on material after 1900.[1][3] In Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby (1910) he recalled that Chicago’s Irish players took it for a recent arrival from Ireland, though his collaborator James O’Neill remembered his father playing a version in Belfast decades earlier.[1]
Scottish melodeon player Fred Cameron, born in Elgin in 1883, recorded the tune for the Gramophone Company in London in 1910.[4] The Tune Archive calls this perhaps the earliest recording, though it gives both January and March for the session.[1] Later recordings indexed on irishtune.info include accordionist John J. Kimmel in 1915 and piper Leo Rowsome in 1926.[3] Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann describes it as a hornpipe long familiar to Irish traditional musicians.[4]
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