Southwind

Southwind is an Irish song air, An Ghaoth Aneas in Irish, and on thesession.org it is filed as The South Wind with a string of other names: The Southern Breeze, The Wind From the South, The Martinmass Wind. The words speak to the south wind and ask it to carry a greeting home to Mayo, and they name Connacht and Munster along the way. A comment on the session quotes Donal O'Sullivan's book Songs of the Irish as saying the song was made in the 1700s by Freckled Donal Macnamara, homesick for Mayo. That comes secondhand, and the page repeats it as that.

The tune is far better known than the words. More than fourteen hundred members of the session carry it in their tunebooks, the singer Archie Fisher recorded the song on his Folk Legacy album The Man With a Rhyme, and one player on the session remembers learning it from the Chieftains. Ewan McVicar later wrote new words, All the Tunes in the World, to a trimmed version of it. A player on the session found it in The Waltz Book, and the Pegram Jam's chord chart book charts it in 3/4. The Traditional Tune Archive lists it by title only, with no score.

The first strain is eight bars, played twice, and it settles on a long G at the end of each pass. The second strain climbs to the high g and runs sixteen bars without a repeat. Its first half ends waiting on A and its second half comes home to G, and both open on the same four bars, so there is less to learn than the length suggests.

On a mandolin this is a tremolo tune. Nearly every bar opens on a dotted quarter, and the air lives in how those long notes are held. Pick each one once at first and listen to where it fades, then fill it with an even tremolo that stops cleanly before the eighth note after it. The long G at the end of the first strain and the long A in the middle of the second are the places to practice starting a tremolo from nothing and keeping it level. Everything sits in first position, from the D on the open D course up to the a at the fifth fret of the E course.