Off She Goes

It turns up in the Irish Murphy manuscript of 1790 and in Thomas Calvert's collection, printed in Kelso in 1799. Later writers credited it to the English composer George Macfarren and to the piper Walker "Piper" Jackson, but Samuel Bayard ruled out both and thought it no older than the 1780s.

It became one of the most widely played jigs in Ireland, Britain and North America, and an old story says ships' fiddlers played it on deck as a vessel left harbor. A Surrey village fiddler who died around 1870 had it in his repertoire, and in French Canada it is known as "La Danse des Sutins."