Fisher’s Hornpipe

For all its standing in old-time and contra-dance fiddling, "Fisher's Hornpipe" began as English theatre and dance music, and the Traditional Tune Archive calls it one of the most popular, widespread and frequently published fiddle tunes in the world. Who the "Fisher" was is genuinely unsettled: the archive names three candidates, including the German oboist Johann Christian Fischer, a friend of Mozart's, alongside the English theatre men James A. Fishar and J.W. Fisher. The clearest paper trail points to Fishar, a dancer and ballet master at Covent Garden, who printed it as a hornpipe in a London collection of 1778. It travelled fast, surfacing as "Lord Howe's Hornpipe" and, in Irish manuscripts, as "Blanchard's." Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford, heirs to the Sliabh Luachra tradition, give it a light Kerry turn on The Star Above the Garter.