Today we’re looking at a tune that you’ll frequently see on lists and in YouTube videos like “Top 10 Irish Session Tunes” and “Irish Tunes Everyone Should Know.” And it is no exaggeration to say that you can and will hear “Cooley’s Reel” at every gathering of Irish musicians.
The melody of “Cooley’s Reel” was originally known as the “Tulla Reel.” It was composed by Joe Mills at some point in the early decades of the 20th century. So why do we call it “Cooley’s Reel” and not “Mills’ Reel” or the original “Tulla Reel”?
Joe Mills was in a band (Aughrim Slopes Ceili Band) with another Joe in the 1930’s and 40’s – Joe Cooley. Cooley became one of the best known accordion players of the time, his fame and association with Mills’ song apparently so great that his name wound up getting top billing on the tune.
You can actually still hear Cooley playing his eponymous song (and many others) today. joecooleytapes.org is the modern home of a series of recordings made of Cooley in San Francisco in the 1970’s. “Cooley’s Reel” appears only once in the collection, in “Tape of Joe Cooley and Miliosa Lundy.” This is an amazing little piece of music history that you can access any time you want!
“Cooley’s Reel” Playing Tips
“Cooley’s” is a challenging tune, and I don’t have a simplified version for you at the moment. I haven’t been able to figure a way to reduce it down while still preserving its original character. If you get rid of those long, flowing lines of 8th notes, it just doesn’t sound like “Cooley’s” anymore.
Luckily, the tune still sounds great even if you have to play it at a slow tempo. Set your metronome as low as necessary to be able to play the whole song in time, and then slowly work your way up.
A trick that is essential to getting this one right, especially as you move up in tempo, is to look for places where you can set all of the fingers on your left hand in a chord shape at the start of a measure and then just leave them there.
This works well for relatively simple measures like 1 and 5 where you can set your first two fingers on the 2nd frets of the G and C strings and then focus on the string-skipping pattern of the right hand. It works even better for the intimidating measure 12, which is really just a G-chord arpeggio.
Set your left hand in the following position, a first inversion of a standard G-chord, and then pick the strings in the ascending and descending pattern found in the music:
I tend to play this tune fingerstyle because of the string-skipping, but you can definitely manage it with a pick with practice.
Click the link or the ‘Download’ button below to see the sheet music if your browser doesn’t display the embedded PDF. Happy picking!
“Cooley’s Reel” Low G Sheet Music Download
Leave a Reply