Organic Intelligence XXI: Fox Chases in transatlantic folk music

In this month's antidote to the algorithm, Jacken Elswyth of Shovel Dance Collective takes us up hill and down dale with a fascinating selection of interpretations of folk standard, the fox chase

I first stumbled across the fox chase on one of those long lockdown evenings, hopping with a drink through YouTube or Bandcamp or Spotify. I’m not sure what route took me to Finbar & Eddie Furey, and I can’t remember whether I was listening to a whole album of theirs or had just landed on a lone track in some playlist or other. I do remember that I had to check what I was listening to, as the trad pipe tune that was previously playing had suddenly transformed into something that sounded like Evan Parker. At the start of that track, Finbar Furey explains the fox chase as “one of the most traditional tunes that we have in Ireland,” which moves from an opening melody to musical imitations of “the sounding of the hounds-master's horn, the galloping of the horses, the letting loose of the dogs, the yelping of the fox through the fields,” and so on, ending with a “lament for the poor dead fox”. 

That track entranced me, but I didn’t at first connect it with other instances of the same or related tunes, despite having already encountered one. Around the same time, I had learned a banjo tune from a video of Dink Roberts’ weirdly clipped and fixed playing, and included it on my album Six Static Scenes, the only one played pretty much verbatim rather than used as a jumping-off point.