Grey Eagle

The tune is named for a horse. Grey Eagle and Wagner ran against each other at the Oakland Race Course in Louisville in 1838, Kentucky bet everything it had on Grey Eagle and Kentucky lost, and a tune folio celebrating both horses came out soon after. William C. Peters printed Gray Eagle Cotillions in Louisville around 1840 and labeled the melody a Scotch air. He was right about that much. It is a transposition of a Scottish tune called The Miller of Drone, which is where the notes come from. A Dallas newspaper writing up an old fiddlers' contest in 1900 still remembered the story, and said Grey Eagle and Wagner had been the favorite airs of the whole country west of the Alleghenies fifty years before.

Mark Wilson noticed something odd about who remembered that. Fiddlers west of Kentucky knew the tune was named for a racehorse and Kentucky fiddlers did not, which suggests the melody spread west first and came back east later. It turns up everywhere: Alabama and Mississippi, southwestern Virginia and Pennsylvania, western North Carolina in the key of C, Missouri, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona. It sits on Charlie Walden's list of a hundred essential Missouri fiddle tunes, and it is one of the tunes a midwestern contest gets decided on.

There is no single Grey Eagle. The collections print anywhere from two strains to seven, and the six settings compared for this page gave six different first strains. What they share is the shape: a first strain that turns around a held A down at the bottom of the fiddle and a second that climbs across the strings on e, c sharp and A. Two parts, played AABB, is what a bluegrass jam calls, and that is what is written out here. Kenny Baker's record on County 744 is the one bluegrass players learned it from, and it is a reference for the shape rather than a source: nothing on this page is taken from it.

On a mandolin it goes down to the low A at the second fret of the G course, which is the deepest note in the tune, and up to the b at the seventh fret of the E course. Everything between those two sits under the hand. The first strain is a right hand exercise disguised as a tune: A, F sharp, A, E, C sharp, A, C sharp crosses three courses in a bar and does it again three bars later, so keep the pick swinging down, up and let the crossings happen inside the swing. The second strain is easier on the hand and harder on the ear, because the D chord bars sound like a different tune until you have heard them a few times.