Compositions by Jackie O’Riley

I’ve loved this tune since I first heard Joey play it as a single jig. To my ear, the rhythm sits somewhere between the dance “Singletime” and hornpipe timing. I’d been loosely thinking of steps for this melody for a few years, but finally sat down and solidified the dance in the early months of the pandemic. I wanted to put a consistent structure on the steps and also use a smaller vocabulary, so that it would be easier to share and dance with others. I enjoy this dance because the steps physically feel good to me! I hope you enjoy it as well.

The rhythm in hop jigs makes for really great dancing, and it’s one of my favorite meters. Unfortunately, very few steps in hop jig time have survived, so I do end up composing in this meter often. This was the first dance I wrote with Joey, back in 2013 after hearing him play it. I also love Ronan Browne’s recording of this tune on The Wynd You Know, played in a set with “As Pat Came Over the Hill”. Here I was trying to dance the piping ornaments, particularly the crans on the B parts, and the phrasing, like the long notes in the A parts. Please note, one of the steps shown here is from Dan Furey’s “Slip Jig” and is marked as such in the notation. I love that dance, and as a habit dance that step within my steps, so I included it here.

We were honored to take part in the 21st Century Dance Master Series, organized by the great Edwina Guckian. Composing both a tune and the steps was certainly a first for us, so there was a learning curve. The process ended up being quite iterative, and we enjoyed working on it slowly over time, suggesting changes for each other. We love pairing piping and step dancing, so we structured it as a set dance. With set dances, I’d usually try to dance them twice through to enjoy the tune, either repeating the set part twice, or dancing two versions of a set together. As is common in Munster sets, I used a traditional step of my choice for the A part on the second time around, here an old favorite, “Curtin’s Pick”, that I learned from Patrick O’Dea in 2010. You could dance this set dance once or twice through, depending on what you preferred.

1. Follow me up to Carlow, single jig
2. The dusty miller, hop jig
3. The artful dodger [comp. Jackie O’Riley and Joey Abarta], set dance