Up Tails All: A Song History
Up Tails All is an old English dance tune that John Playford printed in The English Dancing Master; it stayed in the book up to the eighth edition, of 1690, and later editions left it out.[1] Sources differ on the year of the first edition that carried it, which the Traditional Tune Archive gives as 1651 and William Chappell as 1650.[1][2] Giles Farnaby wrote a keyboard setting of the melody in G major with 19 variations, preserved in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive dates that manuscript to about 1615, more than three decades before Playford's printing, and also finds the tune in Jane Pickering's lute book, compiled between about 1616 and 1650.[1]
Virginal, Italian, wood and various materials, 16th or 17th century. An Italian virginal of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the kind of keyboard for which Giles Farnaby set the tune in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book; the instrument has no connection to the tune.
The title was familiar enough to be dropped into stage plays, and Chappell traced allusions to it in Sharpham's The Fleire (1610), Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb.[2] Cavalier writers fitted a number of political songs to the air, including verses against the Rump Parliament, although Chappell judged that few of them were worth reprinting.[2] He also thought it was probably the poet Robert Herrick's favorite tune, since Herrick wrote one song under its name and five more in its distinctive metre, among them his "Ceremonies for Christmas."[4]
In the twentieth century Cecil Sharp and George Butterworth described Playford's dance in Part III of The Country Dance Book (1912), presenting it as a four-part round "for as many as will."[5] The Traditional Tune Archive lists the tune in Sharp's Country Dance Tunes (1909) and in later Playford collections such as Barlow's 1985 edition of the complete Dancing Master country dances.[1] Mark Gilston has set it for dulcimer in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, whose ZIP download pairs the complete book with an individual PDF of each piece so that players can file the tunes alphabetically.[6]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Up Tails All".
- Internet Archive: "William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, Volume 1 (1859)".
- IMSLP: "Up Tails All, FVB 242 (Farnaby, Giles)".
- Internet Archive: "William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, Volume 2 (1859)".
- Internet Archive: "Cecil J. Sharp and George Butterworth, The Country Dance Book, Part III".
- Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
- Image: Virginal, Italian, wood and various materials, 16th or 17th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.