Soldier’s Joy

One of the oldest and most widely traveled tunes in the fiddle repertoire, a D major reel in print on both sides of the Atlantic since the late eighteenth century. In print by the early 1780s, in James Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs (Glasgow, c. 1782), and a London single-sheet song, “When the shrill trumpet sounds on high,” was printed to the melody around 1760. Though played today as a reel or breakdown, the tune began life as a hornpipe. The c. 1760 London appearance is described as one, and some later collections, including Roche’s Collection of Traditional Irish Music, vol. 2 (1912), continued to print it as a hornpipe.

The tune spread well beyond Britain, Ireland, and North America, with relatives in Scandinavia, the French Alps, and Newfoundland, and it entered English morris dance repertoire under the name ‘The Morris Reel.’ In America it became a cornerstone of the old-time repertoire: the Skillet Lickers’ recorded it (1929 Columbia) with its morphine-and-beer verse, Henry Reed’s playing was recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Jabbour in 1967, and folklorist Jim Griffith recorded a Cherokee family tradition that the tune greeted Cherokee Civil War veterans returning to their tribal home and was played thereafter as an honoring song at their reunions.