Identify a mystery tune from before 1919

June 19, 2021 12:39 AM

My father-in-law is transcribing old letters inherited from a family member. He came across this musical notation with the caption “You know!” in a letter from 1919. Can anyone identify the tune?

Given the interests of the family member, it’s possible it could be a religious hymn or potentially a folk song. Unfortunately that is all the context I have - there is nothing else in the letter that gives a hint.

posted by greycap to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

I don’t know what it is but you can listen to it here in case that helps anyone recognise it
posted by robcorr at 1:12 AM on June 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I put the melody into Musipedia. Adjusted the pitch/rhythm priority slider and "The Healths" by Playford appeared. It's in a different key and has one note different, but it could be your tune.

Here's a recording.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:01 AM on June 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

The Playford tune looks at first glance like it would be highly improbable due to the age of the tune, but it would definitely have been still extant as a traditional folk dance in the British Isles, the kind of thing that they could easily passed approval in conservative villages. It would have been the sort of thing a dance sponsored by a church featured, totally respectable compared to that shocking Jazz or Dixieland music that the young people liked. It's the genre of music that might well have become familiar from dance class at an early age or because there was a barrel organ or piano roll locally that played it or because it was played on a piano on the platform at school closing assemblies... It would have been dowdy music.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:20 AM on June 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm not good at sight reading but it reminded me of "AND THE CAISSONS GO ROLLING ALONG, official Army song since 1956 but was written in 1908. Would that fit the context of the letter?
posted by tmdonahue at 6:06 AM on June 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Braes o Balquhidder ("Will ye go, lassie, go") might be another possibility - the folk-revival version Wild Mountain Thyme didn't exist in 1919 but Tannahill's original song certainly did.
posted by offog at 7:06 AM on June 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

That’s about the height of the era of parlor music, written and printed to be played with and for friends and family, sometimes easy but not always. The range of possibilities for in-jokes is immense. OTOH many good tunes are still known, so you have a chance.
posted by clew at 10:25 AM on June 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

(corrected listenable version on trinket.io. would have posted this in my previous answer but thought the other link had been edited just-in-time)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:27 PM on June 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

The tune reminds me of the "What's the use of worrying" line from "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag," published in London in 1915 and apparently(?) popularized in the U.S. in late 1916. Here's another recording, along with some history, on Youtube.
posted by Carouselle at 12:21 AM on June 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for the collective detective work. Impossible to know for sure, but the tune from The Healths - which is also the tune for a folk song called The Merry Wassail, and I’m guessing for various other lyrics too - looks like it might be a candidate. One bit of context I didn’t have from my father-in-law when posting is that the letter was written by the rector of a church in Suffolk in East Anglia writing to his daughter. So one possibility is it was a folk song played locally which they had both enjoyed.
posted by greycap at 3:54 AM on June 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: 'The Health, or the Merry Wassail' was published by Cecil Sharp in his edition of Country Dance Tunes (Set VII, 1916), which you can download in a PDF copy via the catalogue of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. It's not quite the same as the version in your letter, but near enough to suggest there could be a connection. Country Dance Tunes and its companion volume, Sharp and Butterworth's Country Dance Book (see here), were two of the key publications of the English folk music revival, and anyone in 1919 with an interest in folk song or folk dance would surely have known about them.
posted by verstegan at 12:49 PM on June 21, 2021 [2 favorites]