Fisher's Hornpipe

The tune is usually credited to James Fishar, a music director at a London theater in the 1770s, and the credit should not be leaned on too hard. Attribution on eighteenth century hornpipes is convention as much as record. A name got attached early, printers copied each other, and the tune had a life of its own the whole time. What the name has certainly done is drift. The spelling on the page is now Fisher, and nobody is going to put it back.

It crossed to America early and stayed. A flute manuscript has it by 1783, a Philadelphia printing in D follows by 1796, and through the nineteenth century it became one of the most widely printed dance tunes on either side of the Atlantic, most often in F. That split survives. American old-time jams call it in D, which is where Tommy Jarrell played it and where his father played it before him, while F lives on in Texas contest style and in Canada as the key of the old books. Neither key is wrong, but D is the one a jam will hand you, and D is what is written out here.

On a mandolin the A part is string crossing country. It opens with the D arpeggio coming down, d-A-F sharp-D, then settles into sawtooth pairs that go back and forth across the D and A courses while the harmony changes every half bar underneath, D to G and back. There is very little melody to hide behind, so an uneven pick shows immediately. The B part rockets up the A and D chords to the high a at the fifth fret of the E course, answers itself low, and lands on the open D course, the lowest note in the tune. A high strain with a low landing is an odd shape for a hornpipe, and it is what makes this one stick in the memory.