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Recommended Tune Books for "Quintessential Melody Chords"Try Googling the titles and/or their authors' names for more information/purchase. Barnes, Peter, English Country Dance Tunes, A Collection of 303 Commonly Used English
Dance Melodies, 1986, but recently updated.
There’s also now a Volume II, of mostly original tunes.
(I prefer sticking with public domain tunes.) Keller, Kate Van Winkle and Ralph
Sweet, A Choice Selection of American
Country Dances of the Revolutionary Era 1775-1795, Country Dance and Song
Society, Northampton, MA, 1976. Kennedy, Peter, The Fiddler’s Tune Book (I & II), Hargail Music Press,
Saugerties, NY, 1954. These two
small but wonderful volumes have reels, jigs and waltzes minus the chords,
leaving the harmony up to your imagination. Matthiesen, Bill, The Waltz Book, 1992 and out. There
are three or four volumes now, all of just waltzes, some great for pumping felt. Miller, Randy and Jack Perron, New
England Fiddler’s Repertoire, Fiddlecase Books, Peterborough, NH, 1983.
(Note: In the handwritten version of this book, the authors left out
pickups at the beginning of many tunes to draw the bar lines easily.
There is a typeset edition now that I believe includes the pickups.) Raven, Michael (ed.), One Thousand English Country Dance Tunes (2nd ed, 1999);
ISBN 0-906114-31-4. Contains lots of
very old tunes from The English Dancing
Master (1651) and more. I bought
this in England, so it may take a while to ship to the US.
See what Amazon.com can do. ___, The
Complete Works of O’Carolan, Ossian Publications, 1984; ISBN
0-946005-16-8. Just the tunes, no
chords. A lot of these are in minor
keys, and many of them are in non-autoharp keys (but these can be transposed).
A hitch here is that many of the major-key tunes are well-played within
the autoharp community, but if they’re new to your ears and/or fingers, feel
free. Sweet, Ralph, The Fifer’s Delight, published by the author, revised 1981.
The tunes are crammed in, but there’s a lot of good stuff inside. 1,000
Fiddle Tunes, published
by M. M. Cole, ISBN 0-8471-0450-8. Lots
of good tunes. They are typeset with
the staves quite close together. Finally, if you’re lucky enough to be connected to a contra-dance, English or Scottish dance community, these are sources for all sorts of photocopies of great tunes that get passed around.
As for the Internet: Maybe. You
might find something good here, but again you have to be careful regarding notey-ness
and closeness of version to what musicians of this genre know. Back to class info page.
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