Haste To The Wedding

Haste to the Wedding is a traditional 6/8 jig, most often played in D major, found in Irish, English, Scottish, New England, and French-Canadian tradition. Its earliest known printing is in James Oswald’s Caledonian Pocket Companion, Book 10 (London, c. 1759, p. 94 in Vol 2), as “The Small Pin Cushion”. The tune took its lasting title from the London pantomime The Elopement in 1767, where it carried the song “Rural Felicity,” beginning “Come haste to the wedding, ye friends and ye neighbours.” Morris dancers took up the melody; in Donegal tradition a fiddler played it while leading a bride from her house to the chapel. In North America it entered late eighteenth-century copybooks including those of Captain George Bush and Henry Livingston, and Winston Wilkinson collected it in Albemarle County, Virginia, from fiddler James H. “Uncle Jim” Chisholm, noting that Appalachian fiddlers rarely played 6/8 tunes but that this was among the most common when they did. Herbert Halpert recorded Lauderdale County, Mississippi fiddler Stephen B. Tucker for the Library of Congress in 1939 (AFS L62, American Fiddle Tunes); early commercial versions include accordionist John J. Kimmel (Edison 50653, 1920), piper Liam Walsh with fiddler J. O’Mahoney (Edison Bell Winner 3913, 1926), and Montreal fiddler J.O. LaMadeleine’s crooked setting as the first figure of “Quadrille des seigneurs 1ère partie” (Victor 263618, 1929).