Temperance Reel

One tune, two names, and which one you were taught says where you learned it. Irish players call it the Teetotaler's. American old-time and bluegrass players call it the Temperance Reel, and most of them have never heard the other title. Both names point at the same nineteenth century movement, and the odder of the two words is the Irish one. Teetotal comes out of the English temperance meetings of the early 1830s. The usual account credits a Preston man, Richard Turner, with insisting that nothing but t-total would do: total with a capital T. Whether he coined it, stammered it, or repeated something already going around the room is still argued, but the word was in print by 1833 and it has outlasted the campaign that made it.

The tune itself has no composer and a long paper trail. Kerr's Merry Melodies printed it in Glasgow as the Teetotaller Reel. Ryan's Mammoth Collection, published in Boston in 1883 and probably the most used fiddle book in American history, has it as Temperance. Ford's Traditional Music in America printed it again in 1940 under a third name, Six Hand Reel. The provenance reads Irish, but the tune settled into American playing so completely that it now lives in both rooms. An Irish session will call it in a set of reels, and a bluegrass jam will call it as one of the G tunes everybody has. It is also the joke tune of the repertoire, since half the fiddlers who play it go straight into Whiskey Before Breakfast.

On a mandolin the two strains split the instrument between them. The low strain works the D and A courses, walking G, F sharp, G, A, B, C up out of the fifth fret of the D course and reaching over for one g on the E course each time around. Then it drops all the way to the open D for B, E, E, D and climbs back. The high strain carries the same music onto the E course: B, e, e, d and the run g, e, a, f sharp, with the a at the fifth fret, the highest note in this setting. Both strains close with the same two bars, B, E, E, D into E, F sharp, G, A and the drop home, so the ending you learn first is the ending you keep.