An Old Man is a Bed Full of Bones
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English country dance
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Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
"An Old Man is a Bed Full of Bones" is an English country dance tune in 6/4 time and A Minor.<br> The title originally referred to the name of the dance<br> ("Longways for as many as will"), while the tune was called "Cock Robin," or "Cock Laurel".<br> In the Pattricke Manuscript (also called the "Lovelace Manuscript", an untitled copybook<br> dating to at least 1649, now at the Houghton Library, Harvard), for example, the country dance<br> "The old man with a bed full of bones" (no. 13) is given with the instruction to be played to the<br> tune of "Cooke Laurrel". The "Cock Loerel" or "Cook Laweel" tune is in Choice Collection of 180<br> Loyal Songs, etc. (1685) and in D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719)<br> and is itself a song and appears in Ben Jonson's masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed. The Cock Laurel<br> character was a notorious rogue or knave in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The "Old Man<br> is a Bed Full of Bones" title comes from a song, four lines of which Chappell (1858) found quoted<br> in Rowley's A Match at Midnight. <br> The tune (as "An old man is a bed full of bones") appears in the first edition of John Playford's<br> (1623-1686) English Dancing Master (1651), reprinted in subsequent Dancing Master editions through<br> the sixteenth edition of 1716, then printed in London by John Young. It was also published by<br> John Walsh in The Compleat Country Dancing Master (1718). An Irish derivation of the melody<br> goes by the title "The Priest in His Boots".<br> It was printed in Barlow's Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford's Dancing Master (1985) and<br> Barnes's English Country Dance Tunes, vol. 2 (2005). <br> It was recorded by Pyewackett on 7PM till Midnight.<br> <br>
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