We refer to this group of tunes as The Wedding Set because it is a trio of jigs with connotations of courtship and marriage. "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" references the town of Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, Ireland, which was once the site of an annual matchmaking fair. "Haste to the Wedding," or "Rural Felicity," began its career as a song in the 1767 pantomime, The Elopement. We have paired these two traditional tunes with an original tune by our own Bob Clark called "Jump the Broom," which refers to a wedding ritual common to several different cultural traditions, especially the African slave and Celtic communities. The enslaved peoples in America were were not allowed to legally marry, so they created their own customs, among them jumping over a broom as a symbol of the couple's commitment to each other.
