Cooley's Reel

Cooley's is the reel a session opens with, and on thesession.org it is tune number one, with more members carrying it in a tunebook than any other reel on the site. The name belongs to Joe Cooley, the button accordion player from Peterswell in County Galway, who played with the Tulla Ceili Band and spent much of his life moving between Irish and American cities. Peter Wood wrote that there were faster players and more technical players around, but that a room would empty into the corner where Cooley was, because he put his whole body behind the box and made it talk.

Where the tune itself came from is unsettled, and the people who would know have told different stories. David Taylor credited it to the Mayo and New York fiddler John McGrath. Philippe Varlet said it was written by the accordion player Joe Mills of the Aughrim Slopes Ceili Band, who called it Lutrell Pass. Charlie Piggott heard a third account from Joe Cooley's brother Seamus: that the two of them, teenagers in the 1940s, sat in a house in Clare listening to an old man with a battered concertina, some of its buttons replaced by cigarette ends, and stayed up that night piecing together what they could remember of one tune he played. In that telling Joe built the first strain and Seamus built the second. The tune also travels under Reynold's Reel, Rol na Tulai and the Tulla Reel.

It is in E dorian, which is the D major scale with E as home, so the notes are the ones a mandolin player already knows from the key of D and only the landing has moved. Both strains take the same eight chords, Em and D and nothing else, which is why the tune is so often the first Irish reel somebody learns to back. The two strains answer each other: the first sits low and keeps dropping to the D course, and the second climbs onto e and B and stays up there until the last two bars pull it back down.

On a mandolin it sits between the open D course and the fifth fret. What it asks for instead is even eighth notes at a session tempo, and the bar to slow down for is the third of the first strain, F sharp, D, A, D, B, D, A, D, where the pick crosses back and forth over the D course eight times in a row. Play that bar alone until the crossing stops being a decision. The rest of the tune is easier than it sounds, because the same two bar phrase comes back four times with a different tail on it each time.