Annotation:Paddy Reynold's Dream

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PADDY REYNOLDS' DREAM. AKA - "Paddy Reynolds' Favorite." Irish, Jig. D Major/Mixolydian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABBCC. Staten Island, New York, fiddler Reynolds told Bill Black he had not composed the tune, only arranged it (and added a third part). Reynolds was originally from Ballinamuck, County Longford, and immigrated to New York in 1948. He remembered:

My first job I ever had in this country playing music was in the caberet…I was walking by, I was only a greenhorn, when I heard Irish music. I walked in, stood at the bar, and I was homesick as hell, and I was almost in tears. And there was the lousiest fiddler I’d ever heard in my life on the stage…She came down…and I turned around and I complimented, I says, “ Nice music. You play nice music. My name is Paddy Reynolds.” “Oh, Paddy Reynolds, Where are you from?” She had a husky voice; she liked her whiskey. And I said, “I’m from Co. Longford.” “I’m from Tipperary myself.” And we got talking and well, she says to me, “Do you play music?” And I said, “A little bit, on the fiddle.” “Do you have it with you?”… and I got out the fiddle and I went up on the stage and I played that night. And that night I was employed for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, in Brooklyn, in Plunket’s Cabaret. Incidentally, that’s where I met my darling. [excerpted from Rebecca Miller, “Irish Traditional and Popular Music in New York City,” The New York Irish, 1996, ed. by Bayor & Meagher].

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Black (Music’s the Very Best Thing), 1996; No. 97, p. 50.

Recorded sources: Green Linnet SIF1027, Mick Moloney - “Strings Attached" (1980). Green Linnet SIF1035, Brian Conway & Tony De Marco - "The Apple in Winter" (1981).