Jack's Alive
Jack-in-the-Green track 7
Two dance tunes which I'd been playing for years, before I realised that they are in fact the same tune played in different time signatures. The first, in 6/8, is from Wilson's Ballroom Companion, via one of Bert Simon's Kentish Hops pamphlets. I first heard it played by the Oyster Ceilidh Band. Curiously their first LP was called Jack's Alive, but this tune was not on it; they finally recorded it on their 20 Golden Tie-Slackeners album.
I originally knew the 4/4 tune as an unnamed morris tune from Badby in Northamptonshire. Oyster Morris from Canterbury used it for a dance called 'The Panic' - originally 'Pogle's Panic' - which had been written in the early 1980s by Pete Collinson. It was some years later that I found the tune in The Yetties' The Musical Heritage of Thomas Hardy as 'Jack's Alive'.