The Whish: A Song History

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The Whish is an English country dance tune that the London publisher John Playford printed on page 9 of the first edition of The English Dancing Master, which the Traditional Tune Archive dates to 1651.[1] Cecil Sharp, describing the dance in the 1920s, gave the year of that edition as 1650.[2] Later editions of the Dancing Master kept it up to the seventh, issued in 1686, the year of Playford's death, after which it no longer appears in the series.[1] The Archive sets it in G major and 6/8 time as a single strain, and also lists it under the spelling "The Wish."[3]

Etching of a woman in a full silk gown with lace collar standing before a view of London buildings and gardens

Wenceslaus Hollar, The Seasons: Spring, etching, 1643–44. An Englishwoman in the dress of the 1640s, the decade before Playford first printed the tune in 1651; the etching has no connection to the tune.

Sharp worked out the dance from Playford's directions for Part VI of The Country Dance Book, whose introduction is signed March 1922, and described it as a longways dance for six in three parts.[2] His figures include partners leading up and setting, dancers leading one another between the opposite line and casting off, arming, siding, and a figure-eight for the second couple.[2] In the same introduction Sharp credits Maud Karpeles with helping to compile the volume, adding that she declined to have her name on the title page.[2] The tune is also printed in Sharp's Country Dance Tunes, in Barnes's English Country Dance Tunes (1986), and as No. 104 in Jeremy Barlow's 1985 edition of the complete Playford country dance tunes, published by Faber Music.[1][4]

The Broadside Band has recorded it on John Playford's Popular Tunes (Amon Ra) and on Traditional Dance Music of Britain & Ireland (Saydisc, 2018).[1] Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band play it in an instrumental Playford medley, between "The Wherligig" and "Millison's Jegge," on their Park Records album Hang Up Sorrow and Care.[5] Mark Gilston, described in the book's listing as an ethnomusicologist and national dulcimer champion, arranged it for dulcimer in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, a collection of two dozen old English dance tunes with a companion second volume.[6]

Our book that contains the song "The Whish"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Whish (The)".
  2. Internet Archive: Cecil J. Sharp, "The Country Dance Book, Part VI" (Novello, 1922).
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Whish (The)".
  4. Jeremy Barlow: "Playford".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band: Hang Up Sorrow and Care".
  6. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
  7. Image: Wenceslaus Hollar, The Seasons: Spring, etching, 1643–44. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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