Jackie Tar

The name is sailor's slang: "Jack Tar" was the everyday word for a seaman of the merchant or Royal Navy, one the sailors used of themselves without insult. The hornpipe is older than its Irish life and English or Scottish in ancestry — a "Jacky Tar" was danced in character at Drury Lane as early as May 1740. In Ireland the same melody took up other work: it is the air the Munster poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin set as "An Spealadóir," The Mower, a song of the spailpín or wandering harvest labourer. It also circulates as one of the several "Cuckoo's Nest" hornpipes, a name shared by more than one distinct tune, and in Welsh as "Nyth y Gôg."