Twin Sisters (2 of 2)

As I noted in my previous post on Twin Sisters, which should be read before this one, I had no luck finding a tune called "Twin Sisters".  But there are two other names regularly associated with Twin Sisters: Land of Sweet Erin and The Merry Dance.  Searching for those produced some interesting results.

The Traditional Tune Archive states that "Land of Sweet Erin" is an old Irish jig with a variety of different titles, with the name "Land of Sweet Erin" unique to Elias Howe's books.  That is incorrect; the music was printed under that title in A Collection of Country Dances and Cotillions arranged for the pianoforte (Boston: G. Graupner, c1808-1811).  It includes a set of contra dance figures completely different from the Twin Sisters ones.  Per the extremely useful database Dance Figures Index: American Country Dances, 1710-1830 (DFIA index), another set of figures, only slightly different from the Graupner ones, appear under that title in a c1800 manuscript of dance figures.  And the equally useful Early American Secular Music and Its 
European Sources, 1589–1839: An Index (EASMES) gives three New England music manuscript cites for the tune under that name, with the earliest being a 1795 manuscript from Connecticut.

Howe may have picked up both tune and title from the Graupner publication or, since the tune was apparently circulating under that name in New England, gotten them from another fiddler in his youth.  His first publication of "Land of Sweet Erin", with no dance figures attached, seems to have been in a trio of 1843 music instruction books (School for the Flute, School for the Clarionet, and School for the Violin).  It is included in the 1851 reprint of School for the Clarionet, again without figures, and in a music book published by Oliver Ditson & Company, The Home Circle (Boston, 1859) with a different set of contra dance figures.  The same figures reappear under the "Land of Sweet Erin" title (without music) in Schell's Prompting: How to do it (Boston, 1890).  And the tune turns up outside New England as well; in The Welcome Guest (New York, 1863), it is used, as "Land of Sweet Erin", for a quadrille figure.  I have not even tried to trace it under all its other possible names.

It is clear that "Land of Sweet Erin" was not exclusively attached to the Twin Sisters contra figures.  So how did they come to be linked together?  That seems somewhat more likely to have been Howe's doing.

Ditson, publisher of The Home Circle, was also the publisher of Howe's books in the 1850s.  In 1858, they published two dance manuals by Howe, his Complete ball-room handbook and The pocket ball-room prompter, both of which contained the Twin Sisters figures under that name alone.  But when Howe began publishing his own dance manuals in 1862 with his American dancing master, the Twin Sisters figures began to appear under a longer title: 

The Twin Sisters, or The Merry Dance
(Music: Land of Sweet Erin)

The Traditional Tune Archive notes that in Howe's 1862 The Musician's Omnibus, No. 1, "Land of Sweet Erin" was printed with the alternate title "The Twin Sisters" and the familiar contra dance figures.  I have it the same way in the 1863 No. 3 in the series, as seen here (click to enlarge):

These Howe books appear be the first to link the Twin Sisters figures and "Land of Sweet Erin." With but a single exception (that I have found), his 1891 New ball-room guide, in which the figures were given under the Twin Sisters/Merry Dance titles without a music note, all of Howe's many later publications, all the way through 1892, included both titles and the reference to "Land of Sweet Erin" for the music.

In Howe's c1871 music book, Parlor Dances, and Gott's Old Familiar Dances with Figures (1918), which was yet another Ditson publication, the actual music for "Land of Sweet Erin" appeared with the dance figures and the Twin Sisters/Merry Dance titles.   Here's how it all appeared in Gott (click to enlarge):

Those merely in need of a tune for Twin Sisters may stop here: "Land of Sweet Erin", played AABB as in the Gott music, would definitely be historically accurate.

But what about the other associated name, The Merry Dance? 

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Going back once more to Ditson's The Home Circle, one may find the familiar Twin Sisters figures attached to a tune called "The Merry Dance".  And as noted above, when Howe started publishing his own works in 1862, that name almost always appeared as a second title for the Twin Sisters figures.  While some non-Howe authors (Washburn, French, the anonymous author of Gems of the Ball Room) continued to use only Twin Sisters as the title, others also associated the figures with the name Merry Dance.  In Bonstein's Dancing and prompting, etiquette and deportment of society and ball room (Boston & Chicago, 1884) the figures are listed under "The Twin Sisters, or The Merry Dance", while in Schell's Prompting: How to do it (Boston, 1890) and Elmwell’s Prompter’s Pocket Instruction Book (Boston, 1892) The Twin Sisters and The Merry Dance are listed separately, but with basically the same instructions.  

The association of the name "Merry Dance" with the Twin Sisters figures may have been news to Howe in 1859, but it was not a new connection.  There are at least six early American dance sources (five listed in the DFIA index plus one in the collection of Richard Powers) that give figures for a Merry Dance:

• 1792      (ms.) Jacob Allen's Arithmetic Manuscript. (Walpole, Massachusetts)
• c1795    (ms.) Commonplace book (at the New Hampshire Historical Society)
• 1799      Anonymous, A Collection of Contra Dances of Late, Approved, and Fashionable Figures (Walpole, Massachusetts)
• 1807      (ms.) Cotillions & Country Dances (Boston)
• 1808      Anonymous, A Select Collection of the Newest and most favorite country dances, waltzes, reels & cotillions (Otsego, New York)
• 1810      Francis Nichols, A Guide to Politeness (Boston)

I have only four of the six of these.  The c1795 manuscript and the Otsego collection both have similar figures:

Merry Dance (c1795 ms.)
1st Coup change sides, foot it, back, foot it, hands across 4, back, cross over 1 Coup R & L.

Merry Dance (1808 Otsego collection)
Change sides, foot it back again, hands four round and back, cross over one couple, right and left.

The only difference is whether the second figure is a "hands four across" or a "hands four round".  

It is not possible to be perfectly certain without actually seeing the originals, but it appears from the coding in the DFIA index that the figures in the 1792 Allen manuscript match the c1795 manuscript, and the 1799 Walpole figures match those in the 1810 Otsego book.  But neither of these figures are those later associated with Twin Sisters.

The figures found in the other two sources, the 1807 manuscript Cotillions & Country Dances and Nichols' 1810 Guide to Politeness, are more interesting:

Merry Dance (1807 Cotillions & Country Dances ms.)
The 2 first Ladies take hold of hands & chasse to Gents side, Gent to Ladies side, & rig. back again, lead down middle up, cast off right & left at top

Merry Dance (1810 Nichols)
First and 2d lady chasse across, 1st and 2d gentleman do the same; 1st couple chasse down middle, up, cast off; right and left.

These are early versions of Elias Howe's Twin Sisters figures.  The 1807 manuscript does not include the repeat of the opening for the gentlemen, and the 1810 book does not spell out that all four dancers move at once, two holding hands and two outside, but those are the sort of details not always spelled out.  The 1807 manuscript also includes a mention of a rigodon ("rig."), meaning a setting step, to be performed during the chassez-across figures.  That is typical of earlier dance style, and it fills the time less rambunctiously than the four-bars-each-way chassez figures in Howe. There are several variants of the chassez/set combination in sources going back to the eighteenth century; this one is probably chassez across, set, chassez back, set.  

Merry Dance thus seems to be a title associated early on with these dance figures, and Twin Sisters a mid-century addition, perhaps from Howe himself.  Since Merry Dance is associated with other dance figures as well, I will continue to stick with Twin Sisters as a name for these figures in a mid-nineteenth-century context.  But it is fascinating to see such a direct connection of a mid-century contra dance with its early American country dance roots.

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There is one more problem to consider: the tune, or I rather tunes, called "The Merry Dance", because, alas, there seems to be more than one.  "Merry Dance" is the sort of generic title that, like "Trip to Paris", could easily be dreamed up independently by different composers.  It's hard to even tell whether it's always a proper name or whether "merry" is sometimes just an editorial comment on a piece of music.

There are English and American sources for at least three different tunes (two in 6/8, one in 2/4) called some variation of "Merry Dance" listed in EASMES in the 1785-1798 range.  The oldest reference I have found for dance figures with a tune of that name attached is from a listing in yet another database, Dance Figures Index: English Country Dances, 1700-1827 (DFIE), where it is listed in Skillern's Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1788.  I don't have that particular tune book, so I can't speak to the tune, but, once again, the dance figures are completely different.

I'm not going to make a project of locating and sorting all the early tunes by that name, since my interest at the moment is in the mid-nineteenth-century dance, but the confusion does not decrease over time.  The "Merry Dance" in The Home Circle, shown below (click to enlarge) is, like some of the early ones, a jig:   

But this is not the only mid-century "Merry Dance" music.  The ever-helpful Traditional Tune Archive gives two early cites for the tune, Howe's 1000 Jigs and Reels (c1867) and Elizabeth Burchenal's American Country Dances, Volume I (1918) as well as a transcription from Howe (which matches the tune in Burchenal).  It's in 2/4, and it does not match the music above.  Compare that music with the transcription of Howe's tune at The Traditional Tune Archive and the difference is quite clear. 

It would be reasonable to expect that the "Merry Dance" Howe intended to use with Twin Sisters was the one published in his own book, but one can't be certain.  Those wishing to use it may refer to the transcription at The Traditional Tune Archive.  There are three strains; I leave it to the discretion of musicians as to which one is best repeated for a thirty-two bar dance.  

Alternately, one could use the jig above from The Home Circle, which was obviously associated with the Twin Sisters figures at least once and has a straightforward ABBC repeat structure.

In the absence of live musicians and a recording of any of these tunes, any suitable thirty-two-bar reel or jig will work in a pinch.

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A final transatlantic connection: H. D. Willock, in his Ball-Room Guide: A Manual of Dancing, Revised Edition (Glasgow, c1860), gives yet another different set of figures under the title "The Merry Dance".  The figures have entered modern RSCDS-style Scottish dance as "The Merry Dancers", as may be seen here.  I don't know whether the confusion between "Merry Dance" and "Merry Dancers" is a nineteenth-century one or a modern one; none of my very small collection of nineteenth-century Scottish sources include any other references to a tune or dance of either name.

There are several tunes called "The Merry Dancers" that appear in various indexes, but the incipits and the one source I have a copy of show completely different tunes from any of the "Merry Dance" tunes and the figures given are likewise different.

Comments

[Andrew Kuntz]

I find your tracing of these dances and tunes fascinating, Susan, and exquisitely researched. Well done, indeed!~

[Tom Mack]

Here's a youtube video of Chance McCoy playing a song called "Twin Sisters". https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#inbox/FMfcgxwGCtNXwXbMqwMnCXctDLpNkmZB?projector=1