Originally Posted by
Loretta Callahan
Same jig apparently. I've always known it as Kerfunken.
Same here, Loretta - I called it Kerfunken until I came across an interview where Hammy Hamilton talked about it. I can't remember the link but I'd saved the interview in a file. Here's what he said:
"Q: You have written some fine tunes, the most well-known being "The Woodcock" and "The Kerfunten," which many people simply call "Hammy Hamilton's Jigs," or ascribe to some long-forgotten traditional source. Can you tell us a bit about those tunes: e.g. when you made them up, how you came up with the titles?
A: These two tunes, although normally played together, were actually written many years apart. The Kerfunten was the first and I wrote it while teaching at a workshop in Brittany. It was in a suburb of Quimper called Kerfunteun--hence the name. The spelling seems to have gotten a bit mixed up over the years, though! I think the spelling with the u is the correct one. There was a guitar player there, who was also teaching, and he was messing about one day, playing a chord sequence, I picked up a whistle, and began fitting a tune around them. Ten minutes later it had evolved into the Kerfunten Jig! The Woodcock I wrote some years later--I'm not exactly sure when, but it was sometime in the 1980s. I was looking for another tune to put with it and I remembered the other jig."
Funny that he mentions confusion over the u. Well, no matter how you spell it, it's a fun jig!
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