Issue 2169: List "The Peat Fire Flame" as "Recommended Music" for "Fireside Reel"?

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to »castle_ghost« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Ignored« (previously »New«)

Dear Jonathan,

the suggested music in the publication only lists “The Fireside Reel” and “The Highlandman Kissed his Mother”. There is no specific tune named. Thus, the recordings are the only ones listed.

Recordings or tunes are only listed if they are either named in the publication or suggested by the deviser (or some publishing authority like the RSCDS or here Jack McConachie). Recordings also if they were explicitly recorded for the dance (e.g. if they are given the dance’s name). However, in the latter case the tunes used was a choice of the musicians not of the deviser, which does not make this the officially suggested tune.

Or does anyone of the editors have a different opinion here, as it is used so frequently?

Best wishes and happy dancing, Heiko

The policy of adding tune if mentioned in the original description and linking recordings where appropriate seems the right general rule.

Where there seems to be a tune traditionally used even if it is not explicitly specified we could just put that in extra info. Or else add it as the “recommended” with a note in extra info to say its not actually official but has become the favourite.

In this unusual case, as Jonathan points out (and thanks for taking the trouble to do so), the two recommended tunes seem to be ignored by almost all recordings and it would be nice to mention that somewhere.

The thought also occurred to me that “The Fireside Reel” might be an alternate name for the tune “The Peat Fire Flame”. I don’t have access to a copy of “Scottish Country Dances of The 18th Century” to check whether the notes in that source match “The Peat Fire Flame” as used in the various recordings, but when I searched the ABC Tune Finder I found both a “Fireside Reel” that is recognizably “The Peat Fire Flame” and at least one that doesn’t look at all similar, and on the Traditional Tune Archive each of “Fireside Reel” and “Peat Fire Flame” says it is “Also known as” the other. From that information (which I hadn’t gone to those sites to look for when I submitted the original suggestion) I guess that “The Fireside Reel” was the eighteenth-century name for the tune we now primarily know as “The Peat Fire Flame”?

I’d say “The Peat Fire Flame” is more specifically the name of the song which uses “The Fireside Reel” as its tune.

Incidentally, you don’t need to use the extra-info field if you want to add a comment to a dance-tune mapping. There’s a comment field on the mapping specifically for that. For example, if you look at Cadgers in the Canongate you will find that this refers to John McNeil’s Reel as the “customary ‘original’ tune” and Cadgers in the Canongate as the “original tune as published”. This is intended to represent situations like these where the tune in actual use for a dance differs from the tune that the dance was associated with upon publication.

Recording-to-tune mappings have a facility that lets you point to an alias of the tune, which would show up as “The Fireside Reel (as ‘Peat Fire Flame’)” in recording tune listings, which are notorious for coming up with creative variants on tune titles. Alas, such a facility does not exist yet for dance-to-tune mappings.

Incidentally I do have a copy of Scottish Country Dances of the 18th Century, and it doesn’t include the actual tunes. Having said that, once we’re sure that The Fireside Reel and The Peat Fire Flame actually refer to the same tune we may wish to clean that up in the database, too, by merging the entries for the two tunes and adding “The Peat Fire Flame” as an alias to The Fireside Reel (which has been around longer and therefore gets pride of place).