"Soldier's Joy"

(Billy Peddle (maybe...), John White, Chicken In The Bread Tray, The Clap Dance, French Four, I Am My Mamma's Darlin' Child, The King's Head, The King's Hornpipe, (I) Love Somebody, The Morris Reel, Payday in the Army, Reel Des Pompiers, Reel Du Vagabon, Reel Du Vagabond, Rock the Cradle Lucy, Seksmannsril, Sex Man Engelska)

Hornpipe (Old-Time, Bluegrass, American, Canadian, English, Irish, Scottish; Breakdown, Scottish Measure, Hornpipe, Reel, Country Dance and Morris Dance Tune), Dmaj (Gmaj), AABB (AB (Athole, Bayard?Simmons, Shaw): AABB (most versions): ABCDE (Cooke {Ex. 54})).

FF Type	Tune Type	Var ABC file	FF ABC file	FF .ly file
Standards	tune			MIDI

Orig	History	VarABCs	FF_ABC	FF_Lilypond	FF_Snippet

Playing or Personal Notes:

No personal notes.

History

According to the US Library of Congress;

"Soldier's Joy" is one of the oldest and most widely distributed tunes in the English-speaking world. The tune appeared in late eighteenth-century sheet music and dance instruction manuals on both sides of the Atlantic. By the nineteenth century, it was published in numerous books of fiddle tunes, usually classified as a reel or country dance.

Here's a bit of trivia from the Mudcat Cafe;

Don't know if it was his favorite tune but Thomas Hardy does devote a couple of affectionate paragraphs to it in "Far From the Madding Crowd" (Chapter 36). The passage starts out: "As to the merits of 'The Soldier's Joy' there cannot be, and never were, two opinions. It has been observed in the musical circles of Weatherbury that this melody, at the end of three-quarters of an hour of thunderous footing, still possesses more stimulative properties for the heel and toe than the majority of other dances at their first opening..."

On the Web:

the Session	Fiddler's Companion	Cape Breton Fiddler