Aaron Copland - Hop Light Lady [music transcription]

Meter: 4/4
Transcribed by Alan Jabbour, from a performance by Henry Reed.
Compass: 12
Key: G
Strains: 2 (low-high-low-high, 4-4-4-4)
Rendition: 1r-2r-1r-3r-4-2
Phrase Structure: ABAC QRQC (abac abde qbqr qbde)--"Hop Light Ladies"; ABAC QRQC (abcd abce qrst qruv)--"Speed the Plow"
Related Tune(s): Speed the Plow
Related Tune(s): Speed the Plough
Henry Reed here makes a four-part tune out of two classic reels from British and American tradition. Apparently, during a period of his youth when he was trying to learn to read music, he saw the two tunes combined in medley fashion on a piece of sheet music he encountered. The first he knew from local tradition as "Hop Light Lady" or "Hop Light Ladies," and his performance of it is in the style of that tune as it is usually played in the Upper South. The second is a separate tune known as "Speed the Plow," which is a standard tune in nineteenth-century tunebooks and in the American North and Midwest, but is hardly ever found in the South. See One Thousand Fiddle Tunes, p. 21, "Speed the Plough," for a typical set, though in the key of A. Both performances of the tune by Henry Reed show a different bowing style for the "Speed the Plow" section of the tune, with more separate bowstrokes and less slurring, reflecting its print origin.Both tunes date back to the British Isles at the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not before. "Hop Light Lady"/"Hop Light Ladies" is a Southern American title, however, associated with some playful verses that have gained wider currency through having been published in the Lomax collection Our Singing Country. That set is from the playing and singing of Fields and Wade Ward of Galax, Virginia, and Aaron Copland took the tune from the Lomax book (as Ruth Crawford Seeger had transcribed it) to use as the second instrumental tune in the "Hoedown" of Aaron Copland's music for Rodeo. The tune was also used in the world of popular music for another song, "Uncle Joe" ("Do you want to go to heaven, Uncle Joe?"), so some fiddlers know it by that title. Outside of the South, the tune is usually called either "McLeod's Reel" or "Miss McCloud's Reel" (see, for example, Stewart-Robertson, Athole Collection, p. 6; One Thousand Fiddle Tunes, p. 29). British sets, print tradition, and some North American sets make it a circular tune, with both strains devolving directly into one another instead of coming to rest after a cadence at the end. But Henry Reed's set is typical of Southern sets in coming to rest on the tonic at the end of each strain.