Issue 1765: Correction

Object

Willafjord (Tune)

Submitter

Edwin Werner

Assigned to

Murrough Landon

Priority

Normal

Disposition

Fixed

Description

I think we can be pretty sure that the tune WILLAFJORD, spelled this way and originally published in Hand me doon da fiddle (1981) - which I checked -, is not composed/written by Tom Anderson, but collected by him. There is also no reference to the name Anderson in Ho-ro-gheallaidh. This is what Slowplayers say about it:

“As for this tune, Anderson reports that “Willafjord” was called a “whalin’ reel”, since it was brought back by Shetland fiddlers from their late nineteenth century arctic and Greenland whaling expeditions – there were a lot of fiddlers from many countries that were employed in the whaling industries in those days.”

Noting that Anderson was born in 1910, there is a clear mismatch conerning the mentioned “late nineteenth century” in which Shetland fiddlers seemed to have brought back the tune.

Cheers, Edwin

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