Flop-Eared Mule

Flop-Eared Mule is one of the most widely circulated dance tunes in North American fiddling, recognizable for shifting key between its two parts: the A part sits in one key and the B part moves up a fifth, most often G to D or D to A. It began as a composed parlor piece, the “Detroit Schottische” published in 1854 and credited to Adam Couse, and spread across the United States and Canada as a schottische, polka, quadrille, and breakdown, gathering a long trail of alternate titles along the way, among them “Lop-Eared Mule,” “Long-Eared Mule,” “Bluebell Polka,” and “Monkey in the Barbershop.” The Helton Brothers of western North Carolina recorded it as “Asheville” for Broadway in 1924, and Alan Jabbour later documented it from Virginia fiddler Henry Reed for the Library of Congress.