Some years ago, I would have held the opinion that it was possible that tunes we play now could be 200 years old but had only been written down or published in the last 50 years. In the case of Northumbrian and Scottish music I now think this is very unlikely.
We have a wealth of published material and manuscripts going back well over 200 years. We have several examples Vickers, Rook, the Clough Family of players noting down the tunes they played as an aide memoire. The date at which a tune is written down or published is a latest possible date of composition. If it was composed considerably earlier than that it would only survive past the lifetime of the composer by being played in public so that other musicians would pick it up and it would be incorporated into their repertoire. It would spread through the community until someone wrote it down. So, if it aint wrote down somewhere it wasn't widely played. One may suggest that a tune could be handed down through a family by ear for several generations, but there is no evidence that this has ever occurred to my knowledge. No one ever claimed Jimmy Allan was old, we just assumed it was. Barry On 15 Jan 2009 at 22:57, Dru Brooke-Taylor wrote: > As for Jimmy Allen, one cannot prove that it was ancient from a > negative, but it does look as though there was no one around in the > 1960s or 1970s who claimed that they or their ancestor wrote it. If > this reasoning were valid, which it isn't, it would be persuasive that > if anyone once wrote it, they died before about 1900. It doesn't, > though, unfortunately, provide any direct link to someone who died in > 1810. > > Dru > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
