Red Wing

This one has a paper trail. The music is by Kerry Mills and the words by Thurland Chattaway, published in 1907 by F. A. Mills of New York, and all of it is public domain now. Tab sites rarely mention that Mills did not write the verse. He adapted it from Schumann's The Happy Farmer, the tenth piece in the Album fur die Jugend of 1848. Play the verse, then play Schumann's piano piece, and you will hear it at once. The chorus, the part everybody sings, is Mills's own.

It was sold as an "Indian intermezzo", which was a genre in 1907 and has not aged well, and the song's story is a sentimental one that the fiddle tradition dropped almost entirely. What survived is the tune. It became one of the most widespread string band and square dance melodies in North America, played at dances that had never heard the words. Woody Guthrie reset it as Union Maid in 1940. Quebec players know it as Reel du moulin and may not recognize the English name.

The form on the page is the song's own: sixteen bars of verse, written through so that both times around sit on the sheet where you can read them, then fifteen bars of chorus ending on a held G. At a jam the chorus usually comes around twice, so most people play verse, chorus, chorus. The page is laid out so you can take that turn without hunting for a repeat sign.

This setting is written the way a bluegrass mandolin player fills the tune rather than the way it is sung. The verse still opens with the three strikes on the G, the hammer figure that gives the two-step its walk, and it falls apart if the pick is uneven. After each long d the break walks down and back up onto the c, the C chord bar gets a turn around the g, and the A seventh and D seventh bars that close each half are run through in eighths. The chorus keeps its long notes, so hold the e, the d and the B with tremolo, and fill only in the second bar of each pair. The walk g, f sharp, f natural, e in the middle of the chorus is the one chromatic note in the tune, the f natural at the first fret of the E course. All of it sits in G in first position, and the fifth fret is as high as the hand ever goes.