The Kesh Jig

Kesh is a village in County Fermanagh, near Lower Lough Erne, and the tune is named for it. The paper trail runs back to George Petrie, the antiquarian who collected Irish music through the middle of the nineteenth century. The melody turns up in the Petrie material published in 1902 under the title "Tear the Callies", which is close enough to "The Spring Well" in O'Neill's Music of Ireland of 1903 that nobody can say which came first. It has answered to The Kincora Jig, Sean Coughlan's and The Rambler along the way.

It is a session tune now because of one record. The Bothy Band opened their first album in 1975 with it, in a set that runs on into Give Us a Drink of Water and The Famous Ballymote, and every session in the world learned it from there. Being the tune everybody knows has cost it a little respect: it gets called a beginner's tune, which is what happens to any melody that is both good and easy. Play it at speed with a band behind you and the sneer goes away.

The two strains are built the same way and sit an octave apart, which is what makes it such a good first jig. The first turns around a repeated G down at the bottom and the second takes the same idea up and runs it through arpeggios of B and d. Learn the first and you are most of the way into the second.

On a mandolin the first strain stays on the D and A courses, and the second reaches one b at the seventh fret of the E course, the only stretch in the tune. The work is in the right hand. Six eighths to a bar fall in two groups of three, and the lilt comes from picking down, up, down through each group so a downstroke lands on both felt beats. Hold the dotted quarter that opens most bars for its full three eighths and let the three notes after it fall in one swing, and the tune will sound like a jig instead of a scale.