“Round the Horn,” our TOTW subject for 4 April 2014, is a G major reel, in 4/4 time written by Jay Ungar and copyrighted 1978 by Swinging Door Music. The tune can be found on Ungar’s album Catskill Mountain Goose Chase released on February 22, 1994 on the label Philo.
Jay Unger performed and recorded with mid-60s rock band, Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys, and played with the Putnam String County Band, Fiddle Fever, The David Bromberg Band. He is the founder of the Fiddle & Dance Workshop at Ashokan.
He is of course best known for "Ashokan Farewell," the Grammy-winning and Emmy-nominated theme song of Ken Burns' PBS documentary series, The Civil War. There’s a great video of Ungar and family playing the tune on Youtube, at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZASM8OX7s
Here’s a brief article from 1995 on Ungar’s musical career and interests:
http://historian4hire.net/ziggy/ungar.htm
And there’s a wealth of information on Ungar at his website:
http://www.jayandmolly.com/promo/
“Round the Horn” has an old time vibe to it, in much the same way that "Ashokan Farewell" has an archaic, mournful way that makes it seem a lot older than the 20th century tune it is.
It’s possible that “Round the Horn” came into being the same way “Ashoken Farewell” did, through the fertile musical mind that Ungar brings to the Scottish laments and other Celtic-like music he creates.
In a PBS interview, http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/film/music.html, Ungar stated:
"Ashokan Farewell" is a tune that I wrote unintentionally, really. It was a moment of deep emotion after the summer camps at Ashokan had ended. It was the third summer, and it was an experiment every summer, you know, pulling this together. And it had been such a deeply moving experience and the community of people and the feeling of unity that we had had through music, and being away from the regular world was so important to me that when I’d gotten home, I had a sense of loss and longing; and I was looking for a Scottish lament, you know, that would express how I felt. And I couldn’t think of one, so I just started playing, and this tune came out. And it brought me to tears. And every time I played the beginning of it, for months afterward, I was brought to tears.”
“Round the Horn” is not necessarily going to bring tears to our eyes, but it is evocative and it does have the emotional tension that derives some additional intensity from the way the second part pushes through to a B minor chord that nudges things back to the tune’s first part – creating a perfect Old Time loop that one can play over and again (at least until the fiddler declares an authoritative end to the thing).
Standard notation and chords can be found at:
http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=roaringjelly.org/music/abc/RJ_AllSets%20%281%29/0072
or, alternatively, here:
http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=roaringjelly.org/music/reel/Round_the_Horn_251Jay_Ungar_R_25_/0000
Mike Iverson has a nice tab here:
http://www.bluesageband.com/Tab%20pdf%20files/Around%20the%20Horn.pdf
At the 1:38 minute point in this video, Dave Reiner and David Surrette play Round the Horn. Surrette’s left hand guitar work is accessible for much of the video, providing several useful hints regarding banjo possibilities:
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOG_0SCfncc
James Galway joined Ungar and Molly Mason in a nice version of the tune, wrapped in with a bunch of other reels, on the record Song of Home: An American Musical Journey CD.
I liked this version, too, featuring Robin Bullock on guitar, Chris Norman on flute/penny whistle/smallpipes, Ken Kolodner on hammered dulcimer/fiddle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVecRsx14s
Here’s Third Tyme Out playing a bluegrassy version that’s worth a listen, featuring Russell Moore and Tony Wray on banjos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-X7oBFUKM
I found a clawhammer version on Youtube dating from July 2013 by a fellow who goes by the handle of Idaho Rambler, and I’m posting it here just so I don’t get hit with accusations of blasphemy for including that bluegrass version in a TOTW essay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIsV3nQo-0Y
I learned the tune from Bill Wellington, a local Staunton, VA musician steeped in old time music. He is a fiddler, banjoer, and guitarer of note, was “present at creation” for some of the earliest jams and OT groups in the northeast during the seventies, and did his fair share of field recordings of fiddlers, banjo players, and ballad singers in West Virginia University (see, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-X7oBFUKM) Bill toured with Caledonia, and in recent years has focused on building an elementary school residency program that brings folklore alive for the school community, in partnership with the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
I absolve Bill of any responsibility for my banjo version of this, but credit him for getting me started on this fine tune. When I first heard him play the tune at a house jam about four years ago, when we first moved to this great place in the Shenandoah Valley, Bill was playing with another Staunton, VA, old time fiddler, Walter Hojka, and an exceptional guitar player, Sue Reed. They went through the tune a couple of times, and then Bill stopped, reminded the players of the need to get that B minor chord in, and resumed with that in mind. The minor chord is just a passing sound, but it does make a difference in the flavor of the tune.
Here's my crack at the tune:
And here's a relatively slow take with more focus on the left hand:
Have a great banjo-centric day.
Play hard,
Lew