- Style
- Bluegrass
- Tradition
- Scottish origin, American fiddle standard
- Form
- Reel
- Key
- D
- Level
- 2
- Played on
- Fiddle
In the public domain. Source
Music
Learn the melody first. Each step adds to the one before it.
Adds bluegrass slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs and picked triplets.
Click any note to start from there
Chord chart
History
Rutherford printed it in a Scottish country dance collection around 1756, and James Aird and Joshua Campbell put it in their books later that century. Robert Burns used the tune for the soldier's song in his cantata The Jolly Beggars. American printers in Philadelphia had it by 1796, and related versions are known from Scandinavia, France and Newfoundland.
Southern fiddlers had other names for it. Tommy Jarrell said that around Mount Airy, North Carolina, it was "I Love Somebody" when he learned it in the early 1920s, and that after World War II it became "Payday in the Army." West Virginia fiddler Melvin Wine traced it to his great-grandfather, who was said to have fiddled for his captors' dance while a prisoner in Richmond during the Civil War. Albert Gore Sr. fiddled it on the campaign trail.
Twenty-five cents for the morphine, Fifteen cents for the beer, Twenty-five cents for the old morphine, Now carry me away from here.