DrPhill wrote:
... but wondered how much liberty he has taken with the melody to make it fit his narrative.
Not all that much. I might have done some things differently, but yer man was making a point for the sake of comedy, so he had some leeway in how he got there. It's true, though, that when you change a melody from major to minor and vice-versa, sometimes you have to do some tweaking to get the new thing to make sense to the ear.
For a while there I was doing this myself with tunes, just for amusement's sake. On whistle or simple-system flute it's most easily done by simply shifting the tune up or down a step; sometimes it works right out of the box, sometimes you have to tweak it, and sometimes it won't work no matter what you do. It depends on the melodic structure.
Case in point: The Rakes of Kildare. Just shift it down a step to G major and finger it as usual; works a treat, and no tweaking needed. As a farce I called it The Lawnmowers of Kildare (yes, YES, I know what is meant by "rakes" here) until I found out one day that The Lawnmowers of Kildare already existed before me; I heard a piper playing "my" tune - there was no way he could have gotten it from me - and not long after that found out there was a song with the same melody called Thank God We're Surrounded by Water. So I was not the mad genius after all. It was proof positive that this sort of reworking is not a new idea, at least within the Irish tradition. Besides, even though I'd never heard it before I came up with it, I was pretty sure from the beginning that I couldn't possibly have been the only one ever to have gone there with the very same tune; it wasn't
that revolutionary an idea. But which came first? The Rakes, or TGWSBW? Who knows. And there are others, too. Anyway, pleased with my discovery and feeling mischievous, I trotted it out at a session on a hunch, and sure enough, everybody played along very well indeed, looking bewildered at each other and wondering how on Earth they even knew the mystery tune at all. Then the source was revealed, and they slapped their heads. It was a very interesting demonstration of muscle memory. The icing on the cake was when they heard what I'd named it: Even though they knew full well I wasn't born yesterday, they still sputtered and lectured me on what "rakes" meant, as expected. Good times.
