Durang’s Hornpipe – Fiddle Tune a Day Day 161

I don’t remember where I first heard Durang’s Hornpipe, but it has long been a fiddle contest breakdown staple. And, I remember when Cody Stadelmaier learned a kickin’ version of Durang’s Hornpipe for Dick and Lisa Barrett and came back to the Colorado and Wyoming fiddle contests to clean my clock with it. 🙂 After that, I made sure that Tony Ludiker taught it to me the next time I stayed at his house.

Over the years I have switched it up a bit as I have heard other cool licks from fiddlers. And, the version of Durang’s that Tonya Hopkins played at the Grand Masters‘ was so cool that I had to incorporate some of her licks into my version of Durang’s.

I decided that for this tune, I would play the one of oldest known transcriptions of Durang’s Hornpipe (from Cole’s 1000 fiddle tunes), followed by how I would normally play it, so you can see the contrast of playing the original hornpipe melody and then breaking it down to play it more like a Texas style breakdown.

Durang’s Hornpipe  according to Fiddler’s Companion

DURANG’S HORNPIPE [1] (Crannciuil Ui Deorain). AKA and see “Wobble Gears.” See also “Little Hornpipe.” British Isles, American, Texas Style, Old-Time; Hornpipe, Reel or Breakdown. USA, Widely known. D Major. Standard or ADae tunings. AABB (most versions): AABB’ (Emmerson, Kerr): AA’BB’ (Moylan). The melody is thoroughly ensconced in American traditional repertoire. It is “a Missouri standard,” according to Howard Marshall, and “an old stand-by” remarked Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner (in the early twentieth century). It was commonly played at country dances in Orange County, New York in the 1930’s (Lettie Osborn, New York Folk Life Quarterly, pgs. 211-215) and was part of the older fiddle repertory in Patrick County, southwestern Va., before such tunes were superceded in popularity by clawhammer banjo/fiddle tunes (Tom Carter & Blanton Owen, 1976). The title appears in the repertory list of Henry Ford’s champion fiddler of the late 1920’s, Maine fiddler Mellie Dunham, who was quite elderly at the time. The tune was recorded in the early 1940’s from Ozark Mountain fiddlers for the Library of Congress by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph and was one of the relatively few recordings by legendary Galax, Virginia, fiddler Emmett Lundy. Interestingly, given the usual variation in fiddle tune titles due to faulty memory, “folk process” or other such ‘drift’, it is nearly always found going by the title “Durang’s Hornpipe.”

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Marion Thede speculates the piece was named for Ferdinand Durang, an actor, who first sang the “Star Spangled Banner” in a tavern near Baltimore’s Holiday Street Theatre, but in this she is mistaken, at least in part, for Sam Bayard (1981), George Emmerson (1972) and others researched the tune and definitively conclude that it was named after actor and dancer John Durang (b. Lancaster, Pa., 1768–d. Philadelphia, 1821), styled as “the first American dancer.” Durang (who was born of German parents) stated in his memoirs that it was composed for him by one “Mr. Hoffmaster, a German Dwarf, in New York, 1785.” The thespian had taken violin lessons from Hoffmaster (who, with his wife, was only 3 feet tall “with a large head, hands and feet”), who wrote the hornpipe “expressly for me, which is become well known in America, for I have since heard it play’d the other side of the Blue Mountains (of Pennsylvania) as well as in the cities” (pg. 344, quoted from Downer’s “The Memoir of John Durang, American Actor 1785-1816,” {1966}). Bayard finds the original a much more banal piece than it is today, and that it has been much improved by the aforementioned “folk process,” which has given it character and distinction in his opinion.

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The dwarf’s composition came a year after Durang’s debut with the company of Lewis Hallam in 1784, who had just returned from a long period in England which encompassed the Revolutionary War (Emmerson, 1972). Later in his career, around 1790, he records he danced “a Hornpipe on thirteen eggs blindfolded without breaking one,” which feat points to the dancer’s main claim to fame (beside the tune associated with his name), that of poularizing the nautical-style hornpipe dance the Sailor’s Hornpipe. In fact, from Durang’s time on the nautical theme became intimately associated with the hornpipe dance and the tune “College Hornpipe,” to which it was predominantly performed. Durang went on to dance in comic ballets, “pantomimic dances” and other entertainments, and in 1796 was engaged to direct pantomimes for the circus of John B. Ricketts, a Scottish immigrant, until the enterprise was destroyed in a fire at year’s end, 1799.

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Burchenal gives the tune under the title “The Lady of the Lake [3],” taken from the New England contra dance of that name (which she also prints).

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In the Irish Sliabh Luachra region of the Cork-Kerry border the tune seems to be considered, and used, as a reel  according to Terry Moylan (1994).

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Guthrie Meade (Country Music Sources, 2002, pg. 744), gives nine early sound recordings of “Durang’s Hornpipe,” the earliest by fiddler Don Richardson in 1916, followed by John Baltzell (1924), Clayton McMichen (1927), and the Kessinger Brothers (1927).

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