Cherokee Shuffle

Cherokee Shuffle descends from Tommy Jackson's recording of Lost Indian, and the line is short enough to walk. Tommy Magness recorded a tune called Lonesome Indian in the 1930s, in the key of D. Fiddlers in North Carolina and Virginia took it up as Lost Indian. Jackson, a Nashville session fiddler who played on more country records in the 1950s than anyone has counted, cut it on November 14, 1957, moved it to A, and stretched the second strain by two bars. The record came out in 1958 and the new title stuck.

Those two bars are why the tune is crooked. The second strain runs ten bars against the first strain's eight, and a guitar player who is not paying attention lands early every time. Old-time versions in D are crooked in their own way, twenty bars to a strain, so a fiddler and a bluegrass mandolin player can both know this tune and still not manage to play it together.

Read the chords before the notes. Both strains lean on F sharp minor at the top of a phrase, unusual company for an A tune, and the second strain spends more of its time on D than on A. The E chord arrives late in both strains and only as a turn. The tune sounds a good deal moodier than its key signature would suggest.

On a mandolin nothing here leaves the top two courses for long. The first strain sits between the open A and the F sharp at the second fret of the E course, and reaches the B at the seventh fret once, in the fifth bar. The second strain lives higher, working the F sharp and A above the staff over the D chord before it drops back through C sharp and B to land. The two bars that make the tune crooked, the F sharp minor climb and the E scale that answers it, are the ones to slow down for, because they are the ones your hands will want to skip.