Six white horses (Traditional, arranged and adapted Harley): slide guitar solo
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40-70 (Harley): synth-heavy off-the-wall blues
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Blackwaterside (Traditional, arranged and adapted Harley): guitar solo
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‘Blues For Davy’ was also recorded on home equipment and hasn’t survived very well, but there’s a good guitar piece in there somewhere. I’ve recently been revisiting it, as seen below.
Blues for Davy (Harley): 1980s version (acoustic guitar solo)
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Blues for Davy (Harley): 2020 video
Audio capture of video version: my current favourite despite its length.
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Blues for Davy (Harley): 2020 version (electric guitar solo): another long, semi-improvisational version.
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Blues for Davy (Harley): 2020 version (acoustic guitar solo). Not my best version, but I was rather pleased to be able to get my fingers around it at all. For a long time, I couldn’t…
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Carpentry (Harley): instrumental version of the tune I wrote for my setting of Housman’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son’. The slow section is meant to sound a bit like a desert lute, the second version is intended to sound more medieval, with overdubbed bouzouki and dulcimer.
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A different take on ‘Carpentry’ (Harley). Essentially the same tune, but just solo guitar and using a C-modal tuning.
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The Clown’s Revenge (Harley)
One of the first things I wrote when I first bought an electric guitar. (It was a Watkins Rapier with a very dodgy pickup selector switch: it never got into a recording studio. Not while I owned it, anyway.)
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Diving Butterfly (arr. Harley, Wilkes): a mashup of the ‘Dives and Lazarus’ tune (without which a lot of English traditional songs would be tuneless) and the slip jig ‘The Butterfly’. The fiddle is played by Pete Wilkes, with whom I played quite a lot in the 80s, and the bodhran player was Gail Williams.
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East River (Harley): an improvised slide guitar piece
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Faintly Fahey (Harley)
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Fainter Fahey (Harley): a non-slide version of the tune also posted as ‘Faintly Fahey’
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Loot Suite (Harley): a short vaguely Renaissance-ish improvisation
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Moonflow III (Harley)
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Painting the Desert (Harley)
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Used as background to video:
Quartet for One (Harley)
Baby Taylor strung for Nashville tuning.
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Skeleton Wind (Harley)
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Spanish impro (Harley)
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Swifts (Harley)
Also used as an extended intro to ‘The Wild Swans At Coole’, my setting of a poem by W.B. Yeats.
Slide instrumental version: I don’t do a vocal version.
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Maids of Mourne Shore (arr. and adapted Harley)
I don’t sing this, but love the tune, which is the one usually used for ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’, following Herbert Hughes’s 1909 setting of Yeats’s reworking of a traditional song.
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South Wind/An Ghaoth Aneas (arr. & adapted Harley)
Though for many decades I played guitar or bass in ceilidh bands, I hardly ever play that kind of music solo. I occasionally make an exception for this one, also known as a song by Donal O’Sullivan or with newer lyrics by Ewan McVicar (entitled ‘All The Tunes In The World’).
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The Water is Wide (arr. & adapted Harley)
I don’t usually sing this, but I occasionally get the urge to play it. Nostalgia for the days when you couldn’t get through an evening in a folk club without hearing it, perhaps…
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Moonflow IV (Harley)
A slightly different take on a piece I’ve been playing with for years. This one is just solo guitar. I suspect that I’m not quite finished with it.
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Tears of Evening (Harley) – a short guitar solo
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Bluebert (Harley) – maybe not quite a tour de farce (sic), but longer than it needs to be. I’ll either have to do some very careful editing on it, or learn to play it again.
Wheal Alice Music 