Stoney Steps: A Song History

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Stoney Steps, indexed more often as "Stony Steps," is a two-part Irish reel, generally set in D major though sometimes heard in B flat.[1] The tune index consulted here names no composer or place of origin, and it gathers several other titles for the reel, among them "The Twelfth Lock," "The Cushogue" and two Irish-language names.[1] The title also belongs to unrelated tunes, notably a hornpipe, classed as English and Irish, that the Traditional Tune Archive follows back through manuscripts as early as 1770 and that R. M. Levey printed in his 1873 Dance Music of Ireland, second collection.[2]

Old sepia photograph of a narrow village street climbing as a flight of broad stone steps between ivy-covered houses, with a New Inn sign overhead and a man leading a donkey at the bottom.

Francis Bedford, Clovelly, The New Inn and Street, albumen silver print from glass negative, 1870s. A steep stepped street in Clovelly, Devon, shown for the tune's title; the photograph has no connection to the tune.

The oldest source in irishtune.info’s listing for the reel is the fiddler Johnny Henry, whose collection One Out of the Fort includes it as "The Stoney Steps."[1][3] The piper Seamus Ennis recorded it on The Pure Drop around 1973, and the Kilfenora Céilí Band put it on record at about the same time.[1] Flute player Matt Molloy called his 1987 album, made with Arty McGlynn and Dónal Lunny, Stony Steps, though its sleeve switched two titles in the set, so the track labelled with the album’s name is really the reel Tinker’s Stick.[4][5] The reel is printed in Breandán Breathnach’s Ceol Rince na hÉireann 1 and Martin Mulvihill’s First Collection of Traditional Irish Music, and recordings by John Carty, Mary MacNamara, Réalta and others show it still in use, sometimes paired with reels such as Tinker’s Stick and Coleman’s Cross.[1]

Aaron O’Rourke arranges a "Stoney Steps" in DAD tuning in Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2, a Fingers Of Steel book for mountain dulcimer drawn from the jigs, reels and polkas of Irish sessions, though its listing does not say which tune of that name the arrangement follows.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Stoney Steps"

Sources

  1. irishtune.info: "Stony Steps".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Stony Steps (2)".
  3. irishtune.info: "Johnny Henry, One Out of the Fort".
  4. irishtune.info: "Matt Molloy, Stony Steps".
  5. irishtune.info: "Tinker's Stick".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Aaron O'Rourke, Irish Session Tunes, Volume 2".
  7. Image: Francis Bedford, Clovelly, The New Inn and Street, albumen silver print from glass negative, 1870s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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