Flop Eared Mule

Flop Eared Mule is the tune American fiddlers kept and nobody quite named. Andrew Kuntz's Fiddler's Companion lists it under a dozen other titles, among them Big-Eared Mule, Long-Eared Mule in Don Messer's Canadian repertoire, Lop-Eared Mule in Pennsylvania, Asheville in western North Carolina, Monkey in the Barbershop in the Ozarks and, in New York state, the flat description D-A Quadrille.

Where it came from is a good guess rather than a fact. Paul Gifford's suggestion, which the Fiddler's Companion prints, is that it grew out of the Detroit Schottische, a three part piece written and published in 1854 by Adam Couse, a dancing master who kept a music store in Detroit. Gifford also found that most of the old Michigan fiddlers he met did not know the mule title at all and called the tune a schottische, or sometimes Old Detroit Schottische. Samuel Bayard thought it a fairly modern tune, very popular in the South, that traveled north from there. Melodies close enough to confuse the question turn up in Ukrainian, Swedish, Irish and English collections, so nobody should claim a single parent for it.

It went onto record early and often. Gus Meade's Country Music Sources lists around forty recordings from the 78 era, starting with William B. Houchens in 1923 as Big-Eared Mule and running through Uncle Jimmy Thompson in 1926, Ernest Stoneman and Fiddlin' John Powers in 1927, Doc Roberts in 1928, the Kessinger Brothers in 1929 and the Skillet Lickers in 1930. Vance Randolph recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s.

The page carries the version American players call: first strain in D, second in A. There is an older reading in G and D, which is what the English tunebooks print, and a Galax tradition that keeps the whole thing in G. All three are the same tune. What makes it worth the trouble is the jump. Eight bars in one key, eight in the key a fifth above, and the band has to move with you.

On a mandolin the change is easier than it looks, because the second strain is the first strain's own shape slid up one course. The first strain's run D, E, F sharp, G up to a held A sits on the D course and lands on the open A. The second strain's run A, B, C sharp, D up to a held E sits on the A course and lands on the open E. Learn one and the other is the same fingers one string over. The bar to slow down is the second of each strain, where the line falls A, B, A, G, F sharp, E onto a held D and the pick has to keep its down, up while the hand walks backward.