Greensleeves

The first hard date is September 1580, when Richard Jones registered A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves with the Stationers' Company in London. It was printed in A Handful of Pleasant Delights in 1584 and it sits in William Ballet's lute book, which is where most modern settings ultimately come from. Four and a half centuries on, every part of it is public domain several times over.

Henry VIII did not write it, and the case against the story is short. The tune is built on two Italian grounds, the passamezzo antico under the verse and the romanesca under the refrain, and that style did not reach England until after Henry was dead. That leaves something odd and rather wonderful: the chord progression is older than the melody. Play the changes and you are playing a standard that was already going around before anybody had this tune to put on top of it.

The words most people know now are not the original ones either. What Child Is This is William Chatterton Dix's, written in 1865 and set to this tune afterward. That is why the carol and the love song sound like the same piece of music and read like different centuries.

On a mandolin it is E minor in first position with three open strings doing steady work, and the ear training hides in the accidentals. The D sharp at every cadence is the raised seventh that makes the phrase land. The C is natural in the verse figure and sharp in the refrain descent. That is the old melodic minor at work, not a misprint, and hearing the difference between those two Cs is most of what this tune has to teach. The C sharp in the cadence turn sits at the sixth fret of the G course, the one place the hand has to leave first position.