The Irish Washerwoman

The paper trail starts in Scotland, which surprises people. The earliest known printing is in Robert Petrie's Collection of Strathspeys Reels and Country Dances of 1790, and Niel Gow printed it two years later in his Third Collection of Strathspey Reels. The second strain matches a tune called The Star at Liwis from around 1730, and some writers trace the whole thing back to the English Dargason of the seventeenth century. It has answered to Corporal Casey, The Country Courtship and The Wash Woman along the way.

Whatever its birthplace, this is the tune that got hired whenever anybody needed to sound Irish. Patsy Touhey recorded it on pipes in 1907, which is about as early as recordings go. Leroy Anderson opened his Irish Suite with it in 1946. It plays under scenes in Christmas in Connecticut and Master and Commander, it is what Pa Ingalls saws out on the fiddle in the Little House books, and it has scored more cartoons than anybody has counted. Sessions tease it for exactly that reason. They also all know it.

The two strains are built the same way and sit an octave apart, which is the whole design of the tune. The first stays low and turns around one repeated G, and the second takes the same idea up the neck and runs it through arpeggios. Learn the first and the second is half learned.

On a mandolin the first strain never leaves the bottom two courses and the second reaches one B at the seventh fret of the E course, the only note that asks the hand to stretch. The pick is the real work. Six eighths to a bar fall in two groups of three, and the lilt comes from picking down, up, down through each group so the downstroke lands on both felt beats. The second strain is where that pays off: it is nearly all arpeggios across two courses, and a hand that keeps swinging in the direction it started will cross them cleanly. Three chords, G, D and one Am, so nothing about the left hand should distract you from the right one.