Durang's Hornpipe

Few fiddle tunes carry both a date and the name of the person they were made for. This one does. John Durang, born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1768 and billed in his day as the first American dancer, wrote in his memoirs that the hornpipe was composed for him by a Mr. Hoffmaster, a German dwarf, in New York in 1785. Durang had taken violin lessons from him. He added that it had become well known, and that he had heard it played the other side of the Blue Mountains as well as in the cities.

He was right about that. The tune turns up in American fifers' and fiddlers' copybooks from the first years of the 1800s, in Riley's Flute Melodies of 1814, in Elias Howe's collections and in the Boston tunebooks, and it went on into O'Neill's Irish collections and the New England contra dance books. Guthrie Meade lists nine early recordings, starting with Don Richardson in 1916 and running through John Baltzell, Clayton McMichen and the Kessinger Brothers. The folklorist Samuel Bayard found Hoffmaster's original a much plainer piece than the tune fiddlers play now, and credited the difference to a century and more of players.

The version on this page is one of those descendants, and it is not the tunebook one. The prints open low, on the D chord broken four times over, and answer with a strain that climbs out of it. In Missouri, Texas and the bluegrass jams the order flipped: a newer high strain comes first, falling from the f sharp, and the old low strain comes second. Contest fiddlers add a third strain between them. The Missouri fiddler and folklorist Howard Marshall calls the family of versions a Missouri standard, and Byron Berline put it on record with the Dillards on Pickin' and Fiddlin'.

On a mandolin the two strains ask for different hands. The high strain lives on the E course and the top of the A, and the one to slow down is the seventh bar, the run A, c sharp, e, a and back down, which crosses three courses going up. The low strain is the old D, A, F sharp, A figure, open D, open A, the fourth fret of the D course, open A, and it wants a steady down, up while the open strings ring into each other. The page swaps the tunebooks' low A chord arpeggio in the fourth bar of that strain for a turn on the D course, because a mandolin player in a jam plays it that way and keeps the hand where it was.