I apologize for missing the tune of the month in May. I hope that a three-tune month, even if they are all variations on the same tune, makes up for it!

A fiddle-oriented facebook group I’m in recently challenged people to play tunes older than 100 years old, and it got me thinking: what’s the oldest tune I know? I think it might be a three-way tie between Soldier’s Joy, The Blackest Crow, and this month’s tune, The Cuckoo’s Nest, all of which can be found in recognizable versions in manuscripts from the 1770s, at least. They all probably go back further than that, but in some cases the dating is for lyrics, and it’s difficult to know whether the same melody was associated with the lyrics.

But of those three, I’m pretty sure that The Cuckoo’s Nest is the one I’ve known for the longest. I don’t remember learning it, although it was probably when I was in junior high and more interested in music from the British Isles than from Appalachia. I’ve gone through the music books I know I had at the time and I can’t find a version that’s exactly like the one here, so I probably learned it from a recording. Maybe my violin teacher at the time had her own version, although she was very much a classical player. In any case, the version above is just how I think of the tune. There are many, many variations, as you might expect with a tune that’s been around for at least 250 years. The oldest version I could find which was recognizably an ancestor of the version I know and also had the “Cuckoo’s Nest” title has a third part, and apparently there are some contemporaneous versions with four.

You can find some history of the tune at the fantastic Traditional Tune Archive, so I won’t repeat that here. Just be warned that the lyrics for many of the songs associated with this title may not be entirely safe for work.

A version of the tune I’m still working on is this one, from the playing of Ed Haley:

I first heard this version played by Tatiana Hargreaves and Allison de Groot at a house concert in Seattle. Two warnings about my transcription here: I’ve put it in D Mixolydian, which means that despite being in D, C is almost always natural instead of sharp; and I’ve put two measures of 3/2 in the high part, which I could have instead written as three measures of 2/2. I did this because it really feels to me like the rhythmic emphasis changes in that spot. You may prefer the transcriptions from Tater Joe’s, which don’t do that.

And finally, here is a tune that I didn’t recognize as a version of Cuckoo’s Nest for a long time, although I’m pretty sure it is:

I first heard this in 2016 at a jam outside the hospitality area at Folklife, with Riley Calcagno on fiddle, along with Charmaine Slaven, Charlie Beck, Caleb Klauder, and a flatfooter I’m sure Charmain told me the name of but now can’t find. I actually have a recording of that:

It’s in A, and the parts are reversed from the first version, but give that a listen or play and let me know if you don’t think it’s at least related to Cuckoo’s Nest. The page for it over at TheSession.org certainly describes it as such, anyway. I’m playing it here in cross-A (AEae), and it’s possible to play it in A in standard tuning, but if you don’t want to re-tune, it might be easier in G. (I think it’s actually the case for a bunch of tunes often played in cross-A that they work pretty well as standard G tunes.)

Cuckoo clocks by Avi1111 dr. avishai teicher – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link