Morrison's Jig

The name belongs to James Morrison, the Sligo fiddler who went to America and recorded through the 1930s, and who was known as the Professor. He did not write the tune, and the Traditional Tune Archive traces where he got it. A Kerry accordion player in his band, Tom Carmody, knew it as The Stick Across the Hob and had it from his father, Maurice. Morrison recorded it for Columbia in 1936, and the story Harry Bradshaw tells is that he learned it the night before the session. It was meant to go out as Maurice Carmody's Favourite. The label got it wrong, and one batch of records came out calling it Maurice Comedy's.

The tune was already in print by then. Francis O'Neill had published it in 1922 in his Waifs and Strays as Paddy Stack's Fancy Jig, named for a Kerry fiddler living in Chicago. It went on to be a session standard and, in the northern United States, a contra dance favorite, and the Bothy Band put it on record in 1976.

The two strains are not the same length. The first is eight bars that open on a held low E and a held B, and it is played twice. The second runs sixteen bars without a repeat and lives an octave up, on B and the open E, with a figure of one note and two E's that comes around again and again. Its first eight bars end by climbing F sharp, G, A back into the same figure, and its last eight change course and walk down through g and e to the low D that turns the tune around.

E dorian borrows every note from D major and makes E the place it comes to rest, so the fingering is the fingering of any D tune. The right hand is where a jig is won. Each bar is six eighths in two groups of three, and the pick goes down, up, down, then down, up, down again, so a downstroke lands on both beats and two downstrokes meet in the middle of the bar. Straight alternate picking flattens the lilt, so count it out loud at the slow speed until the hand does it alone. The second strain tests it. Every beat of Bee fee strikes a fretted note and then the open E twice, so the pick is crossing between the A and E courses or staying put on the E course while the fingers come and go. Hold the pattern through all of it and let the open strings ring under the moving notes.