> Folk Music > Songs > Swing and Turn / Jubilee

Swing and Turn / Jubilee

[ Roud 7403 ; Ballad Index LoF122 ; Mudcat 31807 ; trad.]

Jubilee is a gamesong from the Ritchie Family and their Appalachian community. Jean Ritchie sang it on her 1952 Elektra album Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Traditional Kentucky Mountain Family. Edward Tatnall Canby wrote in the sleeve notes:

A singing game—a dance tune sung by the dancers for their own accompaniment, without instruments, in the manner of man children's games. Dancing for the adults was sinful—but singing games were quite proper, and thus the ingenuous mountaineer settled the weightiest question in the world—what is sin— with a euphemism, and had his pleasure too! Jubilee is a reel, lines of dancers facing, couples reeling with whirlwind elbow swings down their length. The lines join in a big circle for the chorus verse, “It's down along the old railroad” as each couple ends the reel.

Rory & Alex McEwen and Isla Cameron sang Jubilee in 1958 on their His Master's Voice album Folksong Jubilee.

Iona Fyfe sang the Appalachian song Swing and Turn on her 2019 EP Dark Turn of Mind. She noted:

An Appalachian song from the singing of Jean Ritchie, I first heard Swing and Turn (Jubilee) from Laura Cortese at Orkney Folk Festival in 2017. The song can be found in Jean’s own book Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie, reissued by the University of Kentucky Press in 1997. The song features on Mudcat Café, an online discussion group and song and tune database. Jean stated on the forum: “Jubilee is a Ritchie family gamesong, but I never did a copyright on it because it was collected from another source in the community—everyone around knew it. A lady named Marian Skein wrote it down at Ary, Kentucky and it was published by Lynn Rohrbough, Cooperative Recreation Service, Delaware, Ohio in 1939.” Lorraine Lee Hammond states that the tune for Swing and Turn (Jubilee) is a common tune of choice for the ballad, Gypsy Davy. In Jeannie Robertson’s “distinctly Scottish version” of The Gypsy Laddies, the opening line of the verse is again the familiar musical phrase used by Jean Ritchie and Woody Guthrie.

Lyrics