Devil's Dream

Devil's Dream is the American name for a Scottish reel. In Britain and Ireland the tune has always been the De'il Amang the Tailors, and under that title it can be followed back to about 1790 and then forward through a century of printed collections. Hamilton's Universal Tune-Book had it in Glasgow in 1844, O'Neill's put it in front of Irish players in Chicago, and it turns up in Scandinavia the way Soldier's Joy does. Somewhere on the crossing the tailors got dropped for a dream. The one wrinkle is that the Scottish publisher Kerr printed it as Devils Dream in his own collection, which the tune's annotators read as the American title making the trip back.

In America it settled in the North, not the South: at home in New England and New York and out through the Midwest. New England collectors printed contra dances named after it, Henry Ford's fiddle champion Mellie Dunham played it in Maine, Uncle Jimmy Thompson played it in Tennessee, and Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress in the 1940s. It also carried a reputation. Tolman and Page's country dance book quotes an old New England fiddler to the effect that a player without his own version of Devil's Dream was of as much account as a string of wampum in the Washington mint, and in New Jersey the story went around that Satan wrote it himself and played it on the devil's box. That last one is a good story and nothing more.

On a mandolin the high strain hardly leaves the E course. Open e, the a at the fifth fret, the g sharp between them at the fourth: those four notes fill three half bars in a row before the run f sharp, e, d, c sharp walks down onto the A course. The low strain answers with c sharp, e, A, e, straddling the A course and the open E, the same rocking motion sitting a course lower. Then both strains close the same way, d, f sharp, e, d into c sharp, A, B, G sharp and a drop onto E and A, so half of what you learn is learned twice. That G sharp is the one note that asks anything of the left hand. Below the A course the only one available is at the sixth fret of the D, which is a stretch of the little finger rather than a shift of the hand.