Drowsy Maggie

Drowsy Maggie is one of the reels nearly every Irish player knows, and on thesession.org it is tune number 27, carried in close to eight thousand members' tunebooks. The Traditional Tune Archive calls it a very common reel that has traveled well past Irish music into repertoire around the world. It was in print by 1858, in P. M. Haverty's One Hundred Irish Airs, and Francis O'Neill printed it in both of his big collections, in 1903 and 1907.

One of the earliest recordings was made in 1924 by the fiddler George Halpin, and in 1938 Alan Lomax recorded Patrick Bonner playing it on Beaver Island, Michigan, where the field notes call it Rousy Maggie. Bonner had learned from older fiddlers on the island who came over from Ireland late in the 1800s. The same year Frank O'Higgins recorded a third strain that some players still add. Liz Carroll has credited that third strain to Joe Cooley, and the Archive doubts it, since Cooley would have been fourteen when O'Higgins recorded it.

The shape is unusual for a reel. The first strain is four bars long and played twice, and the second is eight bars played once, so the tune goes around every sixteen bars. The two strains live in different places. The first rocks on the low E with a B above it, an E minor sound, and the second sits up in D major, climbing to the a on the E course and falling back through c sharp. TrailJams lists it in a set with Cooley's Reel, which is in the same key.

On a mandolin the first strain is the left hand's test. E, B, E, d, E, B, E puts the E at the second fret of the D course and the B at the second fret of the A course, and the pick crosses between them on every note. Lay the first finger flat across both courses and leave it there for the whole bar, so the pick does the crossing and the finger never lifts. The second strain moves more under the fingers and asks less of the pick.