Leather Britches

The tune came over from Scotland as Lord MacDonald's Reel and got its parts turned around on the way. Samuel Bayard, who spent decades tracing fiddle tunes across the Atlantic, worked out the relation, and the American versions generally play the strains in the reverse order of the Scottish ones. It was in the country early: a diary of a tour through Indiana in 1840, printed in 1920 under the name John Parsons, describes a wedding near Logansport where the old fiddler played "in a most lugubrious fashion the old tune of Leather Breeches", and Paul Gifford has found it in print under that title in a dulcimer tablature book of 1859. Uncle Am Stuart put it on a record in 1924, and E.F. Adam printed it in 1928.

Nobody is certain what the name means, and the two explanations are both folklore rather than fact. Leather breeches is a Southern name for green beans dried in the pod, strung on a thread and hung up for winter, which is a good enough reason to name a tune. The other story is that the fiddler's bowing arm on this tune looks like somebody sewing. What is documented is the rhyme. Samuel Bayard collected two lines of it in western Pennsylvania, leather breeches full of stitches, mammy sewed the buttons on, and it turns up elsewhere with two more lines hung on the end about a wife kicking the singer out of bed.

It was a contest tune from the start and it still is. It was played at fiddle conventions in Tennessee in 1899 and in Kentucky in 1919, listed in Alabama newspapers through the 1920s as one of the tunes a contest would be decided on, and Marion Thede called it one of the most frequently heard fiddle tunes in the Southwest. Contest versions run to three parts or more, and the collections print anything from two sections to eight. The two part version is what a bluegrass jam calls, and it is what is written out here: the low strain, then the same idea an octave up.

On a mandolin this is the tune that sends you down to the bottom of the instrument. The fourth bar of the first strain walks D, E, D, C and then drops onto the B at the fourth fret of the G course and the open G below it, which is the lowest note the mandolin has. Nothing in the tune leaves first position, but that is the only bar that reaches down to the bottom course. The first strain climbs the D course and comes back down through the open A, D E G B A G B G, and nothing in it is fretted past the second finger. Fiddle settings write a high D in that figure, which on a mandolin means the fifth fret on two courses in turn, so this page follows the mandolin players and leaves it out. The second strain sits higher and moves in steps.