Eighth of January

Eighth of January is one of the most widely played Southern fiddle tunes, and its name is a date. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson's small American army routed a British force at New Orleans, after the peace treaty ending the War of 1812 had been signed and before either side knew it. The Traditional Tune Archive says the tune was first called Jackson's Victory, and that the anniversary was kept with parties and dances all through the nineteenth century, especially in the South. Around the Civil War, after Jackson's reputation had suffered, the title was changed to name the battle and leave out the man.

How old the tune is gets argued. The Archive reports that some think it was refashioned from an older tune called Jake Gilly, while the folklorist Tom Rankin suggested it may be older than the battle, and American, with no obvious British parent. It was on record by 1928, played by the Arkansas Barefoot Boys and by Dr. Humphrey Bate's Possum Hunters in Nashville. Herbert Halpert recorded Mississippi fiddlers playing it in 1939 and Vance Randolph recorded Ozark fiddlers in the early 1940s, both for the Library of Congress.

In 1936 Jimmy Driftwood, a school teacher in Timbo, Arkansas, put new words to it about the battle, The Battle of New Orleans, reportedly to get his students interested in history. Johnny Horton's record of that song went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. The song and the record are still under copyright, and this page carries only the old fiddle tune underneath them.

The page writes it the way bluegrass and old-time jams play it: a high strain and a low one, four bars each, both played twice, on D, G and A. On a mandolin the low strain is the lesson. F sharp, D, A, D, then B, D, A, B puts the open D course on every other note, so the pick crosses back to the same string again and again. Keep the down, up steady and let the open D ring under the melody the way a fiddler's drone does.