There are a number of online lists of the top Irish session tunes. It's perhaps not too surprising that most of the tunes in these lists have been transcribed to ABC. I collected the ones that I could find, checking to make sure that they're faithful transcriptions of the version in that small tune book. While doing this, I also looked around for other lists of "standard" Irish session tunes, and wasn't surprised to find that I had ABC versions of most of those, too. So I've embarked on a project to make my own collection of Irish Session Tunes. This directory is the result (so far). If you have ABC versions of tunes that belong here, you might mail them to me, and I'll add them here.
The file name here start with the tune name, and end with an abbreviation of the name of the source collection. Between these is a number to determine the sort order for duplicate tunes. I've tried to find "interesting" variants of the tunes, from different sources. Here are the codes for the collections:
| AG | Allan Garvin did an ABC transcription of "P. W. Joyce's "Old Irish Folk Music and Songs" some years ago, and I mirrored it. Then Allan's copy disappeared from the Internet. Hey, Allan, if you're still around, get in touch! |
| DM | Dave Mallinson, whose "100 Essential Irish Session Tunes" is an excellent small book of tunes, with chords that are sometimes a bit idiosyncratic, but usable. This collection started when I realized that I had transcriptions of at least half of his tunes in my Irish and contradance collections. |
| JC | John Chambers (that's me!). Most of my versions were made by playing many versions from the books in my collection and from session recordings. The chords are usually what I've worked out on my accordion. |
| PH | Paul G. Hardy, who has a good collection of tunes online. |
| RJ | Roaring Jelly, the Boston-area contradance band. Their versions are commonly played around New England. |
| TR | Thornton Rose |
The full collection may be found in the single session.abc file at the bottom.
| If you don't have ABC software, you might try a tool of mine that returns the tunes in various formats: CLICK HERE. This will return the page you're looking at now, but the ABC files will be expanded to show all the tunes, and each tune will have a line of links to return it in a number of different formats. |
TBD: List the various online lists of Irish session tunes used to compile this collection.