Rights of Man

Rights of Man is the minor-key hornpipe nearly every Irish session plays, and on thesession.org more than thirty five hundred members carry it in a tunebook. The name is Thomas Paine's. He wrote The Rights of Man to refute Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. It sold some two hundred thousand copies in England, and a royal proclamation banned its sale. The Traditional Tune Archive notes that it kept circulating underground, above all in Scotland and Ireland.

Where the tune comes from is argued. The Archive cites one collection that calls it popular in both Scotland and Ireland and another that thinks it Irish, and Francis O'Neill called it distinctly Irish in tone and structure. The Northumbrian fiddler James Hill is sometimes named as the composer on the strength of one old collection, and the Archive doubts it. O'Neill remembered that when it reached the Irish musicians of Chicago, early in the 1900s, they took it for a new tune, and he printed it in his Dance Music of Ireland in 1907. It was already in print by then: the Archive lists Milne's Middleton's Selection of 1870. The earliest recording the Archive knows is the Scottish melodeon player Fred Cameron's, made in London in 1910.

It sits in E minor with a C natural, the natural minor, and a C sharp shows up once, as a neighbor to the d in the second strain. The first strain walks down B, A, G, F sharp from the top and climbs back up in a scale. The second strain jumps up to the high b and then comes home on the same two bars as the first, so the landing is learned once.

On a mandolin the thing to get 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. The runs E, F sharp, G, A and e, f sharp, g, a are the place to find it, one string at a time with the pick doing all the work. The high b opening the second strain is the seventh fret of the E course, so reach for it with the fourth finger and come straight back down.