Whiskey Before Breakfast

Whiskey Before Breakfast is younger than most of the tunes it gets played alongside. It comes out of Canadian fiddling, and the name most often attached to it is Andy De Jarlis, the Metis fiddler from Manitoba whose playing and recordings carried a great deal of that repertoire out into the wider world in the middle of the last century. Whether he wrote it or learned it is still argued. Nobody argues that his version is the one everyone else learned from.

From there the tune moved south. American old-time and bluegrass players picked it up during the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, and it spread the way tunes did then, hand to hand at festivals and from one borrowed recording to the next, until it was turning up at jams that had no idea where it came from. The title has a few origin stories. All of them involve a long night and a bottle, and none of them come with any paperwork. Enjoy them as stories.

It is a satisfying tune on a mandolin because it covers most of the instrument without ever asking for a shift. The A part starts down on the open D string and walks up from there, so the low half rings against the open strings the whole way. The B part answers an octave higher and stays up around the top, a good place to be reminded to keep the pick light. The chord to watch is the Em in the third bar of that part, under the bar that hangs on a repeated E. It comes around once a pass, and without it the second half would be a plain D tune. You will hear it both ways at a jam. Bluegrass players put the Em in, and old-time backup often just holds the A through it.