Rum Ragged has always put a contemporary spin on its salt-covered folk music,
but Gone Jiggin’ is a new approach, reaching back through time for a reverent
celebration of heritage. Leaning proud and hard into their Newfoundland roots, the
quartet led by Mark Manning and Aaron Collis offers a dozen songs, a mix of fables
and memorials that criss-cross the island they call home, interpreted and arranged
as a robust and incisive historical document.

Recorded in downtown St. John’s, produced by Billy Sutton at The Sound Solution
and Pipetrack Productions (TSS’s Jason Whelan mastered), Rum Ragged packs
proficient and melodic bouzouki, fiddle, bodhran, banjo, guitar, and button
accordion into largely upbeat, high-octane songs with the occasional slow-down
into a gentle lilting ballad.

Gone Jiggin’ traverses Newfoundland to its farthest-flung points, starting on “The
Road to Lushes Bight (Island Stock),” a town of fewer than 200 on Long Island
in Notre Dame Bay; dropping in on the east coast in “The Viking Jig—West Bay
Centre” (Newfoundland being home to the North America’s only official Norse
outpost); and west to “The Green Shores of Fogo,” aka the world-renowned
destination Fogo Island. The house-hopping instrumental “Ray Head’s/Harry
Eveligh’s/Mrs. Belle’s” also nods to Fogo in the form of Harry Eveleigh, as well as
the playing of Ray Head in Glenwood and Belle Fennelly in Aquaforte.

On their travels Rum Ragged tells classic trad tales of “Paddy Hyde”—”the
sporting young blade” who was a famous fisher—cover the jaunty Gerald
Campbell tune depicting the flamboyant “Thomas Trim” (“a dandy dashing dude
that you don’t see every day”) and “Riley,” an interpretation of Johnny Burke’s
“Riley and I Were Chums,” which sees a man needing a fixer over and over, and his name is Johnny Riley. Gone Jiggin’ closes out with “The Apple Tree,” a fast-
picking, high-strumming ode to life by Roger John where come what may, you can just ride it out in the apple tree.