Tune of the Day: The Croosting Cap
This tune is taken from the manuscripts of Irish artist George Petrie (1790–1866), which were first published posthumously as a complete collection in 1902. It is listed as a Munster jig, obtained from William Sheady via collector Patrick Weston Joyce.
The Irish-English verb “to croost” means to throw clods, derived from the Irish crústa, meaning a clod. There was a custom called “croosting” in the Irish “merry wake” tradition, where the dead person is waked with carnivalesque features. Generally an individual would be called upon to be the “organiser and director of the pranks and games of the wake assembly” (Ó Crualaoich, in Irish Popular culture 1650–1850, 1998), aided by his “hardy boys” or “prime lads”. These pranks and games had the purpose of keeping the wake attendees awake throughout the night. The games could be mimicry of local citizens or institutions, horseplay, and “croosting”, which apparently consisted of pelting those assembled with hard turf and other objects.
Francis O'Neill included a very similar jig in his 1903 and 1907 collections, under the title “The Sod of Turf”.