Bonaparte's Retreat

Fiddlers play it as a story: a slow march at first, getting faster as Napoleon's army falls back. Some drummed the strings with the bow and plucked them to sound like muskets and cannon. Most play it in D with the fiddle cross tuned to DDAD.

Arkansas fiddler Absie Morrison (1876 to 1964) called it French bagpipe music. One tale says a Scottish piper made it up after Waterloo, but Samuel Bayard traced it to an old Irish march.

In 1937 Alan Lomax recorded Kentucky fiddler W. H. Stepp playing it for the Library of Congress, at nearly twice the usual speed. Ruth Crawford Seeger's transcription of Stepp ran in Our Singing Country (1941), and Aaron Copland made Stepp's version the main theme of "Hoe-Down" in his 1942 ballet Rodeo.