"Off to California"

No personal notes.

Per TTA:

AKA and see "Going to California," "Humors of California" "Whisky Hornpipe (The)," "Whiskey You're the Devil," "Whiskey in the Jar (1)," “Portsmouth Hornpipe," "Possum up a Gum Stump (1)," "Old Towser," “Miss Johnson’s Hornpipe,� "Gypsy Hornpipe (4)," "Buttermilk and Cider" (Pa.), "Fireman's Reel." Irish, English, American; Hornpipe. USA; New England, southwestern Pa.

G Major (most versions): A Major (Craig). Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Doyle, Silberberg): AABB (most versions).

The hornpipe probably has an Irish provenance, although the melody has been adopted by several genres. The first part combines with other parts for "Fireman's Reel," "I'm Waiting for You (2)," "Silver Cluster," "Five Miles Out of Town" and the Texas-collected "Mabel." A version from the North of England appears as “A Clog Dance� in Doyle's Plain Brown Tune Book, the modern publication of selections from the c. 1847 manuscript of Ellis Knowles, a musician from Radcliffe, Lancashire. Seattle fiddler, producer and folklorist Vivian Williams found a version of “Off to California� in a hand-written music manuscript book dating from the 1860’s and 1870’s from western Oregon, where the melody is titled only as “Jig Cotillion.� Like many such manuscripts, it belonged to a musical family, and tunes were entered in different hands probably by different generations. Francis O’Neill also collected the tune in California in the mid-19th century. See also the related “Hillside Cottage� and the reel “You Bet.� "Far from Home" is sometimes confused as a member of the tune family, owing to its similar form (AA'BA, where the latter part of the 2nd strain returns to repeat the beginning of the 1st strain melody) and to the melodic and harmonic similarity of the 2nd strain, particularly in the first four measures. The melody may also have been called "Lexington," although this name is shared with other tunes.

The first strain of "Going to California [1]" is shared with "Clog Dance (2)" in Aberdeen publisher Thomas Craig's Empire Violin Collection of Hornpipes, printed around the turn of the 20th century, and with William Bradbury Ryan's "Leviathan Hornpipe (2)." The second strains of the tunes are different from each other.

Additional notes

Source for notated version: - Capt. Francis O'Neill learned this tune in the San Joaquin Valley of California when he was aged 19—presumably the title appealed to him in his circumstances, having left County Cork in his mid-teens [O'Neill/Irish Folk Music].

Per TS:

This tune has been recorded together with

• The Liverpool(lots of times),
• The Boys Of Bluehill(a few times),
• The Plains Of Boyle(a few times),
• The Rights Of Man(a few times) and
• The Showman’s Fancy(a few times).

As usual with hornpipes, this tune needs to be played with a certain "bounce". If you overdo it, though, it’ll just sound twee. The trick is to play it with a different emphasis than you would play a reel but without going completely over to the "dotted" rhythm that you see in so many transcriptions of hornpipes.

I find the first part of this tune fairly bland but the second part has a nice cascading sound that I like.

# Posted by Jeremy