Donkey Riding

“Donkey Riding” is a folk song or sea shanty that was sung in Atlantic Canada and New England. The words and melody were adapted from “Highland Laddie”, an older Scottish folk song. The donkey in this song is not an animal, but a steam-powered tractor used to load and unload cargo ships.

Folk song lyrics vary from region to region, and people often added verses about ports where they worked and lived. The first verse and chorus are often:

Were you ever in Quebec,
stowing timber on the deck?
Where you’d break your bleeding neck,
riding on a donkey.

Hey-ho, away we go,
Donkey riding, donkey riding,
Hey-ho, away we go,
riding on a donkey.

The Alberta Registered Music Teachers Association (ARMTA) ran a competition to commission composers to arrange a Canadian folk song for student instrumentalists. I was commissioned to write an arrangement only 16 to 32 measures long for an elementary string student! This is the result.

“Donkey Riding” for elementary violin student with piano

Published by Palliser Music Publishing

Excerpt from the composer’s article about “Donkey Riding” in ARMTA’s “Tempo” magazine in 2018:

When I was a boy at Cambrian Heights Elementary School, one dedicated teacher did her best to teach folk songs to my unruly class. We learned “I’s the By” and “Savez-vous Planter les Choux,” and “Donkey Riding.” I had no idea that she was at the forefront of a trend to teach Canadian folk songs to children across Canada, reflecting the work of Zoltán Kodály in Hungary a decade earlier. I also had no way of knowing that ten years later I would be a composition student with Dr. Richard Johnston, co-author of the definitive collection, “Folk Songs of Canada.”

Over the years, I developed my compositional skills and knowledge, eventually becoming a professional member of the Canadian League of Composers. While finishing my largest, most ambitious choral work, “The Helios Triptych,” I received the commission from ARMTA to arrange a Canadian folk song to be performed by an elementary string student.

Creating an arrangement of “Donkey Riding” was an interesting and enjoyable challenge for me. The commission specified that the music be only 16 to 32 measures long, suitable for an elementary string student. Although the piece would be a miniature, I still wanted the performer to feel challenged and to have fun at the same time. Writing for strings gave me the opportunity to improve my composition skills as I learned more about bowing technique from my sister, a violinist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. I wrote phrasing and some bowing indications, but left room for the student and teacher to make practical performance decisions.

I chose “Donkey Riding” because it has a bouncy, playful melody that I learned as a schoolboy, and that stuck with me all these years. To maintain the playful quality, I used alternating dynamic levels and a lively piano accompaniment, along with accented notes and pizzicato notes at the end. It was a delight to hear the premier performance by Alayna McNeil at Music Conference Alberta 2017. If the performer and audience enjoyed my boisterous, whirlwind arrangement of “Donkey Riding,” I felt that I had succeeded!