Ten Penny Bit: A Song History
"The Tenpenny Bit" is an Irish double jig in 6/8 time, usually played in two repeated parts.[1] Its Irish-language title is given as An Píosa Deich bPingine, and it also turns up as "Joe Conway's," "Are You Shot?," "The Bridal Jig" and "Made in Ireland."[1] In the Sliabh Luachra district on the Cork–Kerry border it is sometimes called "The Ducks and the Oats."[1] In its notes on a closely related setting, the Traditional Tune Archive observes that "bit" long served as a name for small coins (from the 1500s into the 1800s), so the title would mean a tenpenny piece; it adds that the word could also carry a bawdy second sense.[2]
Johannes Hendrik van West, A Fiddler in a Tavern, with Three Men in the Background, watercolor over graphite, mid-19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Dutch tavern fiddler, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.
Francis O'Neill printed two settings in Music of Ireland (1903), Nos. 929 and 930, and included the tune again in The Dance Music of Ireland (1907).[1][3][4] The first came from Abram S. Beamish of County Cork, while the second came from Chicago fiddler James Kennedy, who had learned it from his father in Ballinamore, County Leitrim.[1][3] The tune also appears in the large nineteenth-century manuscript of James Barry (1819–1906), a fiddler in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and George Petrie printed it as "The New Tenpenny."[1] Irishtune.info gives the tune in G major and notes that some printed settings use a markedly different first part in A Dorian.[4]
Paddy Killoran (1904–1965), a Sligo fiddler who had settled in New York, recorded a version in 1934.[1] Later recordings include Denis Murphy's 1969 Music from Sliabh Luachra, along with albums by Bobby Casey, Dervish and Matt Cranitch with Jackie Daly.[4] The title is not attached to one melody alone: irishtune.info also lists "The Tenpenny Bit" as another name for the jig "The Three Little Drummers."[5]
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