Woodicock: A Song History

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"Woodicock" is an English country dance tune in jig time that John Playford printed, with its dance, in The English Dancing Master.[1] Britannica notes that the book appeared in 1650, although it is dated 1651.[2] The dance appears there as "Wooddicock" on page 15, and an index of the Dancing Master editions from 1651 to 1728 traces it through the eighth edition of 1690, retitled "Woodycock, or The Green Man" from the 1670 edition on.[3] A facsimile page from the 1686 edition heads the dance "Longways for six," that is, three couples, and runs it through figures that include siding, arming, and heys.[4]

Etching of a hunter aiming a gun among tall trees in a dense wood

Charles-Émile Jacque, Shooting the Woodcock, etching, 1864. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

The Tune Archive links the title to the woodcock, a bird easily trapped at dusk in nets known as cock-shuts, and cites Anne Gilchrist's 1939 note that early playwrights often used "woodicock" to mean a simpleton.[1] The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which the Tune Archive dates to about 1615, contains a keyboard setting in six sections by Giles Farnaby titled "Wooddy-Cock," numbered 141 and written in D minor.[1][5] The Tune Archive treats that setting, and an "Engels Woddecot" in Adriaen Valerius's Nederlandtsche Gedenck-Clanck of 1626, as earlier forms of the Playford melody, though the sources consulted here do not compare the versions note by note.[1]

Cecil Sharp and George Butterworth included Playford's "The Whirligig" in The Country Dance Book, Part IV (1916), a collection of forty-three dances drawn from the English Dancing Master.[6] The Tune Archive reports that Sharp set the Whirligig figures to the Woodicock tune, not to the tune Playford printed with that dance, and the archive gives "Woodicock" as an alternate title for "Whirligig."[7] Mark Gilston, described in the book's listing as an ethnomusicologist and national dulcimer champion, includes "Woodicock" in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, the first of two volumes of dulcimer arrangements of old English dance tunes.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Woodicock"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Woodicock".
  2. Britannica: "John Playford".
  3. Country Dance and Song Society: "The Dancing Master: 1651-1728, A Compendium - Index-W".
  4. Country Dance and Song Society: "Woodycock, or The Green Man" (The Dancing Master: 1651-1728, A Compendium).
  5. IMSLP: "Wooddy-Cock, FVB 141 (Farnaby, Giles)".
  6. Library of Dance (HathiTrust scan): "The Country Dance Book, Part IV" by Cecil J. Sharp and George Butterworth (1916).
  7. Traditional Tune Archive: "Whirligig (1)".
  8. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
  9. Image: Charles-Émile Jacque, Shooting the Woodcock, etching, 1864. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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