Bill Cheatham

Bill Cheatham is an old Southern reel with a documented trail and no known owner. It shows up as a fiddle contest category tune in Gallatin, Tennessee in 1899, well before anybody could record it, and it reached wax in 1928 on a Victor side by Blind Joe Mangrum. Who Bill Cheatham was, nobody knows. Several candidates get proposed and none of them come with evidence. The tune outlived whatever the name meant.

No single hit record carried it into bluegrass. It came in through the contest and jam repertoire, though Kenny Baker's 1968 recording is the version a lot of players learned from. What keeps it in rotation is that it sits in plain A major with no modal shading at all. The A tunes it usually gets called beside are mixolydian, flat sevenths everywhere, and this is the bright one among them. Calling it after a couple of those is a deliberate change of light.

On a mandolin the A part comes in on a two note pickup, G sharp and F sharp on the D string, and lands on an E that lifts straight into the held C sharp at the fourth fret of the A string. From there it runs the descending c-B-A-c figure that gives the tune its shape. The B part is the work: an arpeggio ladder, e-c-e-a over A, f-d-f-a over D, g-e-f-g over E, climbing to the A at the fifth fret while the chord changes twice in every bar underneath. The left hand stays in first position throughout. The pick is what gets tested, because arpeggios across three strings only sound even once the crossing has stopped being a decision.