Harvest Home

Harvest Home is one of the hornpipes nearly everybody learns, and it has traveled under several names. Irish sources call it the Cork Hornpipe, and in Ohio it goes by the Cincinnati Hornpipe, the Traditional Tune Archive says, as it does for anyone who learned it from Ryan's Mammoth Collection. The earliest copies the Archive lists are English: the Browne family's music manuscript from the Lake District, from about 1825, and Lionel Winship's from Northumberland, dated 1833. It was in print by 1846, in Hamilton's Universal Tune Book, and it was known in America by the 1840s, when the Long Island painter and fiddler William Sidney Mount wrote it into his music manuscripts without a name.

The name comes from the harvest home itself. In parts of Britain that meant a community dance once the crops were in, and the Archive quotes an account of one an Oxfordshire landowner gave for the people he employed, danced on the stone floor of his courtyard to a local fiddler. The tune was on early records too. The Scottish fiddler William Craig made an Edison cylinder of it in 1909, and Michael Coleman recorded it in 1921.

In Irish sessions today it is often paired with The Boys of Bluehill, and the Archive notes that the two together are thought of as something of a beginner's set. That is fair. Both strains keep returning to the open A between the notes of the tune, and the second half of the second strain is the second half of the first. Only two chords go under it.

On a mandolin the thing to learn here is the hornpipe bounce. The page writes even eighths, but a hornpipe is played long, short, long, short, the downstroke leaning on the first of each pair and the upstroke catching the second quickly. D, A, F sharp, A in the opening bar puts the open A course on every upstroke, which makes it an easy place to find that swing. The second strain opens on the open E course against the open A, e, A, A, A, and it wants the same lean.