William Vickers manuscript

From 1770-2 a man called William Vickers made a manuscript collection of dance tunes, of which some 580 survive, including both pipe and fiddle tunes. The manuscript is incomplete - 31 pages have not survived, though their contents are listed at the beginning of the book. In the mid-19th century, it belonged to the pipemaker John Baty, of Wark, Northumberland, and it now belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is kept in the Northumberland County Record Office at Woodhorn, Ashington.

Little is known of the man himself, but something can be learned from the manuscript - he was obviously a keen musician, and many tunes are only playable on the fiddle. The collection does not only contain fiddle tunes however, for instance there are numerous tunes with the characteristic 9-note range and mode of the Border pipes. Several of the tune titles refer to Northumberland and Durham and a lot of other tunes are local to the region, so it is reasonable to conclude he lived in or around Newcastle. He may well have been the William Vickers who was married at St Nicholas, Newcastle, in 1775, probably the same as the Excise Officer of the same name whose son, also William, was baptised there the following year. He certainly had some education, and a sense of humour - the tunes are introduced by a poem:

Although many tunes are local to the North East of England, many others are from Scotland, southern England, Ireland and even France and Germany, revealing the very extensive and varied repertoire of local musicians at that time. Again, many of the tunes go back a century and more to sources such as Playford, while many others were contemporary, for instance 'Tristram Shandy' is named after the novel whose first volumes were published just a decade before. There is a wide spread of tune types - FARNE lists 53 9/8 jigs, 192 6/8 jigs, 251 reels, 20 triple-time hornpipes, 32 common-time hornpipes, and 17 cotillons.

The collection includes many tunes not known elsewhere, while many tunes still current today make their first known appearance in it, including 'The College Hornpipe', 'The Irish Washerwoman' and 'Soldier's Joy'. Frustratingly, one of the 31 missing pages included the first known reference to 'The Morpeth Rant', a characteristic local dance tune.

A facsimile of all the tune pages of the manuscript is visible on FARNE, with some annotations by Matt Seattle. The recent 2nd edition of the published book contains much more detailed notes, making clear the relation of tunes to any contemporary published or manuscript versions known, and listing many alternative titles for the tunes. There had been a local revival of interest in this music since the 1960s, led by the High Level Ranters. After the first publication of an edition of the tunebook in 1987, this interest became much more widespread. Many of the tunes are once again current in Northumberland and elsewhere, and are frequently performed and recorded.

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