How Irish Is the Irish Jig?

I grew up playing traditional fiddle music, but here's something that seems strange in retrospect: I didn't grow up playing many jigs. They weren't part of what I learned from Mellie Dunham's Merrie Melodies. Although I eventually encountered O'Neill's enormous collections of Irish music, jigs weren't initially what I took from them either. And when I entered fiddle contests as a kid and teenager, nobody particularly wanted to hear a jig. The world I knew revolved much more around breakdowns, reels, waltzes, hornpipes and tunes that showed what an American fiddler could do.

Then I started playing contradances, and suddenly there were jigs everywhere.

That has always struck me as a little odd. If the jig is one of the great forms of traditional fiddle music, and particularly one of the defining forms of Irish traditional music, how had I managed to spend so much time around fiddling without really encountering it? Recently I began digging into the history of the hornpipe and discovered that much of its popular origin story doesn't survive close examination. That made me wonder whether the jig had acquired a similar mythology. It has, and the answer to the question "How Irish is the Irish jig?" turns out to be much more complicated than the usual story suggests.

The Jig Before Ireland

The earliest secure use of the word as a dance name appears not in Ireland but in Scotland around 1560. The Scottish poet Alexander Scott used the Scots word jeigis in work preserved in a manuscript dated 1568. In England, John Foxe referred to "Scottishe gigges" in 1570. The evidence therefore points toward Britain, particularly Scotland and England, for the earliest documented jig. Even the English reference associates the form with Scotland.

There are older European words that look tantalizingly similar. Medieval French gigue and German gîga, for example, existed earlier, but those words referred to a fiddle or bowed instrument rather than securely identifying the dance we now call a jig. The ultimate etymology remains uncertain. What matters for the history of the dance is that we currently have no securely dated French, Italian or Irish dance called a jig that predates the Scottish and English evidence.

This becomes particularly important when we look at some familiar stories about the Irish jig. Claims are sometimes made that Irish jigs were known during the reign of Elizabeth I. One story cites a supposed 1569 letter by Sir Henry Sidney mentioning Irish jigs in Galway; another claims that Elizabeth herself enjoyed Irish jigs. If genuine, these would be tremendously important pieces of evidence. When the references are followed backward, however, they appear to lead to W. H. Grattan Flood's 1905 history of Irish music, where the claims were presented without a usable citation to the original source.

There is a genuine document that may have helped give rise to the story. In 1602 the Earl of Worcester wrote that "Irish tunes are at this time most pleasing." That's fascinating evidence for the popularity of Irish music in England, but he said tunes, not jigs. At present there is also no documentary evidence for the frequently asserted medieval Irish jig. The claim appears to be another example of a later assumption gradually acquiring the appearance of established history through repetition.

Early Jigs Didn't Necessarily Sound Like Jigs

To a modern traditional musician, the word jig immediately suggests compound meter, particularly 6/8, with its characteristic ONE-two-three, FOUR-five-six pulse. But the earliest surviving musical jigs weren't defined that way. Some were written in duple meter. Giles Farnaby's Nobodyes Gigge is one example, and the three pieces identified as jigs in the first edition of John Playford's The English Dancing Master in 1651 likewise do not conform to the standardized 6/8 form a modern fiddler would expect.

The early jig therefore seems to have been identified more by character, function and association than by one mandatory meter. The transformation into the form familiar today happened gradually. By the 1690s, 6/4 had become common, and between roughly 1680 and 1750 the jig increasingly settled into its characteristic compound-meter identity. By the middle of the eighteenth century, 6/8 was becoming standard. In other words, something called a jig had existed for well over a century before it became quite the musical thing modern traditional musicians mean when they use the word.

The continental gigue and Italian giga complicate the story further. Anyone familiar with the Baroque suite knows the gigue as the lively movement that often concludes the sequence, and it's tempting to draw a simple line connecting the British jig, French gigue and Italian giga. The evidence isn't nearly that tidy. There were clearly relationships among these forms, but exactly how the music travelled between Britain and continental Europe remains unresolved. The evidence currently suggests transmission from England to the Continent sometime around 1630–1650, although no document records a convenient historical handoff.

Even the often-repeated claim that Johann Jakob Froberger introduced the gigue in 1657 doesn't withstand scrutiny. A lute gigue by Wolfgang Ebner survives from 1648, while Froberger's own autograph contains one from 1649. Traditional music history is full of wonderfully precise statements that become considerably less precise when someone goes looking for the primary sources.

Becoming Irish

The evidence for the jig in Ireland becomes much clearer during the eighteenth century. A jig or "gigga" appears in Irish print in 1724 in the Neal collection, with further examples appearing in eighteenth-century collections including those associated with Thumoth around the 1740s. By the later eighteenth century we also have direct descriptions of jig dancing in Ireland. Arthur Young, travelling through Ireland between 1776 and 1779, provides one of the earliest eyewitness accounts explicitly describing the Irish jig being danced there.

During the following century Irish musicians and dancers did something enormously important: they made the jig thoroughly their own. An enormous repertoire developed, along with increasingly recognizable varieties. By the nineteenth century writers such as George Petrie and P. W. Joyce were documenting distinctions familiar to traditional musicians today, including double jigs, single jigs and hop or slip jigs.

This is why saying that the jig probably originated in Scotland and England does not mean that the Irish jig somehow isn't Irish. Culture doesn't work that way. Musical forms travel. Musicians adopt them, change them, compose within them and sometimes develop them so extensively that the adopted form becomes inseparable from the new tradition. Ireland may not have invented the jig, but Ireland became one of the places where the jig truly flourished.

Listen to Woodkerne performing "Johnny Williams" Jig: https://audius.co/vervemusic/johnny-williams

This would be a good place for one of my Woodkerne recordings. The history stops being an abstraction when we can hear what generations of musicians ultimately made from the form.

How Old Is the Irish Jig?

Another common statement is that the jig is the oldest surviving Irish dance form. That can be true, but only if the sentence is carefully defined. The jig appears to be the earliest attested of the major tune types that make up today's Irish traditional dance-music repertoire. In that particular sense, the chronology is jig first, followed by the duple-time hornpipe in the later eighteenth century and the reel, arriving from Scotland, later still.

That's quite different from saying that the jig is Ireland's oldest dance. Long dances, country dances, sword dancing and other forms have earlier documentary histories in Ireland. Calling the jig an ancient indigenous Irish dance goes considerably further than the evidence allows. This may sound like a small semantic distinction, but the two statements describe very different histories.

There are similar problems surrounding the famous story of Will Kemp. In 1600 the actor and clown danced from London to Norwich and subsequently published his account as Nine Daies Wonder. Kemp often wanders into histories of the jig, but his own title page tells us what he was doing: a morris dance. Playford later published a tune called Kemps Jegg, but the shared name isn't evidence that Kemp jigged his way to Norwich.

The Elizabethan stage jig creates still more confusion because it wasn't necessarily a single dance at all. It could be a comic theatrical afterpiece combining song, dancing, dialogue and farce, traditionally performed after the main play. It became sufficiently notorious that the Middlesex Sessions suppressed such afterpieces in 1612. Even in Shakespeare's England, therefore, asking "What was a jig?" doesn't produce one simple answer.

The Jig Comes to America

This part of the history unexpectedly brought me back to my own experience as a fiddler. Jigs absolutely crossed the Atlantic, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections such as Howe, Ryan, O'Neill and Cole contain plenty of them. But printed collections tell us what publishers and collectors chose to print. They don't necessarily tell us what an ordinary rural American fiddler was actually playing on Saturday night.

In much of American fiddle culture, duple-meter music increasingly dominated. Breakdowns and hoedowns suited changing dance traditions. Commercial recordings reinforced that repertoire, radio reinforced it again, and bluegrass inherited much of the same rhythmic world. Fiddle contests helped institutionalize it. Major American contests generally didn't require a jig; the expected categories instead became things such as a hoedown or breakdown, a waltz and a tune of choice.

That was very close to the musical world I encountered growing up. Nobody told me that jigs didn't exist. They simply weren't particularly important to what I was being asked to play.

Yet there is evidence that the jig hadn't disappeared nearly as completely as the conventional history might suggest. Samuel Bayard's enormous collection of traditional Pennsylvania fiddle tunes, based on music collected from actual musicians and eventually published in 1982, contains a surprisingly large body of music in 6/8. Roughly thirty percent of the collection falls into that rhythmic world. The musicians, however, didn't necessarily call these tunes jigs. Some were known as quadrilles or cotillions.

That's a beautiful warning about studying folk music through terminology alone. Search historical sources only for the word jig and you might conclude that the form disappeared from a particular community. Listen to what the fiddlers actually played and it may be sitting right there under another name.

And Then I Walked Into a Contradance

This finally helps explain something about my own musical history. Jigs remained particularly healthy in New England contradance music, as well as in Irish-American communities and the Canadian Maritimes. The structure of contradance doesn't demand that every tune be a reel. Its familiar 32-bar dance forms work perfectly well with both reels and jigs.

So when I entered that musical world, suddenly the jig wasn't an historical curiosity or something buried halfway through a tune book. It was working music. Someone called the dance, someone called the tune, and you played the jig.

Listen to Celticado performing "A Kilfenora Set", medley of jigs: https://audius.co/vervemusic/kilfenora-set

I'll put a Celticado recording here because this is where the historical story intersects with my own musical one: not the jig preserved as an artifact in a collection, but the jig as something musicians still play together.

The Jig and the Hornpipe

I began this investigation because I had just been researching another supposedly ancient dance form, the hornpipe. The parallels are striking. Both names have early British histories. Both musical forms changed substantially over time. Both eventually became deeply embedded in Irish traditional music. And both accumulated origin stories that became tidier and more certain through repetition.

But they're not identical histories. The hornpipe underwent its great metrical transformation from triple to duple time relatively abruptly around the 1760s. The jig's evolution was longer and more diffuse. After its basic compound-meter identity emerged, musicians continued reinventing it in Ireland, England, North America, Québec and Métis communities. By around 1800, jig and hornpipe could even function fairly loosely as terms for solo step dancing rather than the precise musical categories musicians use today.

That's one of the things I find most fascinating about traditional music. The tradition is real, but that doesn't mean the music has been sitting still for five hundred years. Change is part of the tradition.

So How Irish Is the Irish Jig?

Very Irish, but probably not because Ireland invented it.

The best documentary evidence presently points toward a jig emerging in sixteenth-century Scotland and England, with the musical form gradually acquiring its familiar compound-meter identity between roughly 1680 and 1750. Ireland adopted the form during the eighteenth century, after which Irish musicians and dancers transformed it into one of the defining sounds of their own tradition.

Centuries later, that tradition carried the jig around the world. Meanwhile, in parts of American fiddle culture, the jig faded from prominence. It survived strongly in particular communities and dance traditions, sometimes even surviving under other names, while breakdowns, reels and waltzes increasingly occupied the center of American fiddling.

Which finally explains something I've wondered about for years. I didn't somehow fail to learn one of the basic forms of traditional fiddle music when I was young. I learned the repertoire belonging to the fiddle culture around me.

When I eventually walked into an American musical tradition where the jig had remained alive, useful and necessary, I found it.

It was waiting at the contradance.