- Style
- Old-time
- Tradition
- American fiddle
- Form
- Reel
- Key
- D
- Level
- 2
- Played on
- Fiddle
In the public domain. Source
Music
90bpm
Click any note to start from there
Chord chart
History
It comes with a skit. A lost traveler asks a backwoods fiddler for directions and gets only jokes, until he picks up the fiddle and plays the second half of the fiddler's tune. Pieces of that routine date to the 1820s, and minstrel shows paired it with the music.
Sheet music for the tune existed by 1847. An 1863 Oliver Ditson edition credits Mose Case, a Buffalo guitarist, and Cincinnati violinist Jose Tasso was also said to have played it in the early 1840s. Neither claim is settled. Folklorist Samuel Bayard found no British original and suggested it grew from several older tunes in America.