Lucy Farr’s barndance

Lucy Farr’s barndance is a well-known session tune, and a great tune to learn. Though the melody is fairly straightforward, it is a lovely tune to play, and you can really concentrate on playing with a light touch, and the sort of rhythmic lift that a barndance should have.

This simplicity of the tune means that you will hear many small variations on the melodic theme from different musicians. The setting that I’m teaching as the ‘basic’ melody in the tutorial is a fairly standard one, but there is lots of room for variation.

In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to play Lucy Farr’s barndance on the fiddle. This lovely Irish tune, is named after Lucy Farr, a fiddle player from East Galway, but whose player is most associated with the London Irish scene of the 1950s and 1960s.

This barndance has become associated with Lucy Farr’s name, though she would have called it The Kilnamona.

Fiddle players, if you would like to take your fiddle playing to the next level, take a look at my online fiddle courses, including my free Irish fiddle course.