St. Anne's Reel

St. Anne's Reel is French Canadian, out of Quebec, and old enough that nobody can point to who made it. The name is the interesting part and the unsettled part: some say it is for one of the many Sainte-Anne parishes, others for the shrine at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré downriver from Quebec City. Both are plausible, neither is documented, and you will hear each one told with complete confidence.

It got out of Quebec largely through Don Messer, whose radio broadcasts and records carried Maritime and Quebecois fiddling across Canada and well down into the United States in the middle of the last century. From there it kept going. It is now as likely to be called at a bluegrass jam in Tennessee as at a ceilidh, which is a short list of tunes to belong to.

The A part leans on held notes instead of a stream of eighths. The first bar sits on an F sharp, lifts to a G and comes back, then walks down to a B. The second bar drops lower and does the same thing: an A, then an F sharp that holds for half the bar. That A is an open string and so is the D underneath it later on, so let them ring instead of stopping them. The ringing is most of what makes the tune sound like itself.

The B part starts higher, on the notes of a D chord played one at a time, then sits on a G while the chord underneath is E minor. The fourth bar of the B part is the one to listen for: B down to A, A again, G sharp, then A and a G natural. That G sharp is the only accidental in the tune. It pulls toward the A chord, and the G natural right after lets it go. The whole bar sits on the E string, B at the seventh fret, G sharp at the fourth, G natural one fret below at the third, so your hand hardly moves.