Red Haired Boy

Red Haired Boy is the same tune on both sides of the Atlantic, and it answers to a different name on each. Irish players know it as The Little Beggarman, a hornpipe that carries a song of the same name, and the Irish title An Buachaill Rua translates straight into the one Americans use. Which name you hear first depends on which room you walked into.

American fiddlers flattened the hornpipe's swing into a reel, and it became one of the reliable crossover tunes, called at an Irish session and at a bluegrass jam in the same key on the same night. That is rarer than it sounds. Most tunes that make the crossing get transposed, retitled, or quietly rewritten. This one mostly did not. How and when it made the trip is not documented, so the usual story about emigrant fiddlers is a reasonable guess and no more than that.

The mode is what people hear first. A mixolydian is A major with the seventh flattened, and the G natural is all over this tune, not tucked away in one bar. The cadence figure that closes the fourth bar of each part, B down to G, then E up through F sharp to a held G and back to F sharp, is the bar that tells a listener which tune this is.

On a mandolin the two parts are closer than they look. Everything from the third bar onward is the same in both, so the B part is one new phrase followed by the tune you already learned. That phrase opens on the high G natural, third fret of the E string, and turns around it for a bar and a half before dropping back into shared ground. Nothing here climbs to the seventh fret B that so many tunes in A ask for. The top of this one is the A at the fifth fret of the E string, reached in the seventh bar of both parts. The G natural in the fourth bar sits at the fifth fret of the D string. Get that cadence clean and you have most of the tune.