“The Cuckoo’s Nest” is an English melody that was known throughout the British Isles and British North America by the early eighteenth century. It is played as a hornpipe, a reel and a breakdown. Its title was a common euphemism for a woman’s anatomy, and it is listed as both song and tune in the Roud index (Roud 1506 and 5407). The versions differ a great deal, in major and minor keys. Matt Seattle, editor of the Northumbrian William Vickers manuscript, believes it began as a Scots Measure in D minor called “Come Ashore Jolly Tar (with) Your Trousers On.” James Aird printed it under that title in the first volume of his Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (1782), with a fourth strain that no other printing has. It went on to appear in many dance collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in Henry Robson’s list of popular Northumbrian tunes of about 1800. In Jacobite Relics (1819) James Hogg printed a song to it, “The cuckoo’s a bonny bird,” and remembered that in his youth all the old people who could sing at all could sing it. A Scottish country dance of the same name was still being danced in West Berwickshire in the nineteenth century. It should not be confused with the English morris tune also called “The Cuckoo’s Nest,” which is a different melody danced in the Cotswold villages.
In Ireland the eighteenth-century Munster poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin set his poem “An Spealadóir” (The Mower) to the tune. It is commonly known by that name there, although Breathnach, writing in 1985, traced the title to a verse of a Munster love song. The Clare whistle player Micho Russell called it “The Man That Cuts the Hay with the Scythe.” Around 1900 Father Henebry argued that the third part of the Irish versions was a recent addition.
The tune reached America early. The musician Giles Gibbs of New Windsor, Connecticut, wrote it into his manuscript book in 1777. It is also in Clement Weeks’s dance collection of 1783 and Henry Beck’s flute manuscript of 1785, and the Connecticut clockmaker Daniel Burnap built it into a chime clock. It is still a staple at New England contra dances. Collecting in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1943, Samuel Bayard found it very popular among fiddlers and fifers there, including Emery Martin of Dunbar. Their versions leaned more toward the mixolydian than most Irish settings, and they stayed dance tunes rather than song airs. The northeastern Kentucky fiddler Ed Haley played a similar version. The title is on Vance Randolph’s list of Ozark fiddle tunes, published in 1954, and Texas fiddlers took it up, probably from Canadian or Midwestern players. In 1975 Mark O’Connor recorded it with Norman Blake and Charlie Collins for his Rounder album National Junior Fiddle Champion. Blake recorded it again the same year on Old and New, and John Hartford included it on All in the Name of Love in 1977.
