Liberty

Liberty is an American reel with nobody's name on it. It has been at home in the Appalachians long enough that nobody has finished tracing it back to a composer, and the settings in the old collections differ from each other in the small ways that mark a tune passed along by ear, hand to hand.

The name has invited guesses, as a name like that will. At least one tune database floats a Civil War era origin, and you can see why somebody would want that to be true, but nothing documents it. Treat it as a story. What is documented is the playing. Marcus Martin of Swannanoa, North Carolina, and the Kimble family of southwest Virginia both left field recordings, and most modern versions descend from that line. The tune now sits in two rooms at once. Contra dancers call it for the drive of it, and bluegrass jams call it as one of the D tunes everybody already has.

On a mandolin the high strain is a seesaw with a long drop built into it. The F sharp at the second fret of the E course falls all the way to the open A course, twice over, and then a run climbs back through f-g-f-e. The same rock answers two bars later on g and B over the G chord, third fret of the E course down to the second fret of the A. The low strain works the other end of the instrument, walking down from A through G-F sharp-E and climbing the D arpeggio, D-F sharp-A-d, straight off the open D course. Both strains then close with the identical descending run, g-f sharp-e-d into c-A-B-c. That run is what a listener recognizes, and having it already under your fingers is why the second part goes in faster than it looks like it should.