Langstrom’s Pony

Its odd, near-meaningless name is the clue. One of the oldest jigs in continuous play, it turns up across the early collections under a scatter of garbled spellings — "Lastrum Pone" in John and William Neal's A Choice Collection of Country Dances (Dublin, 1726), "Lastrumpony" in James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (c.1760), later "Lang Strumpony" and "Lostrum Ponia" — which the Traditional Tune Archive reads as corruptions of a lost Gaelic original. Those mixed Scottish and Irish printings leave its nationality genuinely open, and the archive notes the tune may possibly be of Scots origin. O'Neill printed a version of it as "Saddle the Pony" (Irish "Cuir Diallaid Air An Clibín"), one of several names it still travels under. The tune sits in A Mixolydian, and the C natural colouring its last part gives the melody its faintly dark edge. Mary Bergin recorded it on Feadóga Stáin.