Sandy: I am deeply saddened to learn you can't click on a Clicky & play the tune or read a thread. Still, I suppose such disabilities must be accepted in these days of Americans-with-Disabilities-Acting. No, your tune is, I believe, the actual traditional one. Carthy used "My Dearie Sits Ower Late Up," (page 155 in Northumbrian Minstrelsy) because he liked it.

When I first heard him do this, before I had the advantage of liner notes, I became irate and threatened to pour boiling lead on him if he didn't explain the rhythm. (Carthy saw this was no idle threat as President Taylor and I were at that very moment melting a lead pipe. It coincidently happens that one MacEwan's beercan-full of lead exactly equals the weight needed to replace a lost one on a grandfather clock [I don't know enough clock history to know if that's an accident or not] and we were making a new weight. It worked, BTW.

I've always hated flamenco both for the sexual frustration of it and also the impossibility to tap your foot to it for more than a few seconds unless you'd studied the stuff for years. I was less likely to put up with Brit folk song that just never did that kind of thing with a rhythm to people. Oh maybe an off-rhythm bar now and again but never throughout a whole song.

He happily said that's why he used the tune. The liner notes go into this but most don't catch it and, in fact, the signature is usually just given as 9/8. Bruce & Stokoe just do that. But it's really 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3. Now I could foottap and was happy again and allowed the new lead weight to cool. (Remembering, of course, to insert a loop of wire clothes hanger in the top fitst.)

No, I'm really just trying to find out why he also calls it "Drunken Piper." It's hard to believe there's more than one drunken piper.