I have a cassette tape, The World Turned Upside Down (GM 110) by Barry Phillips & Friends: instrumental arrangements of music popular around the time of the American Revolution.

It includes the tune of this name and much more, and is one of our favorites. Good for hours and hours. Here are some excerpts from the promo material and liner notes. Some of the following appears with the tape's J-card, but the rest must only be on the CD booklet; I found them online.


Barry Phillips and Friends explore the colorful variety of music popular in late 18th and early 19th century America, from elegant Colonial drawing rooms to homely frontier hearths to rollicking waterside taverns. The title tune, according to legend, was played by Cornwallis' surrendering troops at Yorktown; the album also includes dances and folk songs (All The Pretty Little Horses, Rights of Man, Fisher's Hornpipe, Love in a Village) along with a suite of early American classical music by the Boston master William Billings. As always, liner notes provide colorful background history of the music and the times.


The World Turned Upside Down - Liner Notes

"Secular social music permeated every corner of society. Instrument owners included urban and rural colonists; men, women and children; blacks and whites; all social classes: the middle and upper, the humble and ordinary, Puritan and non-Puritan. All types of social music were played by the colonists: popular, traditional, and serious."

--Barbara Lambert, Social Music in Colonial Boston

Legend has it that as Cornwallis' troops surrendered their arms at Yorktown in 1781, they played a march popularly known as The World Turned Upside Down. The tune was first published in 1643 in the British Isles as When the King Enjoys His Own Again -- a favorite among anti-Cromwell Royalists who were the revolutionaries of their time. The melody soon crossed the Atlantic under several titles, including Derry Down, The Old Women Taught Wisdom and The World Turned Upside Down. Though scholars and historians continue to debate among themselves, no one can now confirm or refute the time-honored reports of the redcoats actually playing the tune at the battlefield ceremony. In any event, to the once-proud army of the mightiest empire in Europe, it certainly must have seemed as if The World Turned Upside Down. This version was taken from Chappell's Popular Music of the Old Times.

Music and dancing, as in most societies, were part of the very fabric of life in England and Northern Europe. Settlers emigrating to the New World naturally brought their pastimes with them. Though much has been written of the influence of the Puritans, dancing in the colonies was never forbidden except perhaps on the Sabbath, though some theologians were notorious for their opposition to any expression of pleasure, no matter how innocent. The fiery sermons of zealots like Cotton Mather, and the terror of the infamous Salem witch trials and other persecutions have perhaps crowded the equally authentic images of village folk dancing and making music from our perception of early American life.

Much spontaneous dancing and merriment took place in homes and taverns, in parlors and out of doors, and on any festive occasion. Many of the settlers' dances were from the well loved book The English Dancing Master by John Playford (1651). These group dances were similar to our modern square and contra dances and were simple to perform. There were in the Boston area a number of "dancing masters" who gave a more professional level of instruction. From the formal gavotte, minuet and bourrÚe to the circle and squares for eight, dancing was always popular among all classes of people in the colonies. Just as the basic dances were imported from the old world, so were the lively tunes to which they danced.

Books were not always easy to come by in the New World and many colonists wrote out their own collections of tunes, lyrics and dance instructions in journals and commonplace books which are now a rich treasury of historical documentation of life in those times -- and an invaluable source of material for our album.

(Acknowledgements include Professor Daniel Patterson, University of North Carolina.)


SONGBOOK AVAILABLE
The World Turned Upside Down: Complete arrangements and lyrics for all the music on the album of the same name. (Please contact Praise if you purchase this-- I am hot for one tune from it not available anywhere else.)

To visit Gourd Music's site, Click Here

~Susan~