Appalachian music. Bonaparte's Retreat [music transcription]. Note sheet.

Meter: 4/4
Transcribed by Alan Jabbour, from a performance by Henry Reed.
Strains: 3 (low-high-high octave, 4-4-4)
Title change: This tune is transcribed after "Lost Indian" on the page.
Key: E
Rendition: 1r-2r-3r-2r-1
Phrase Structure: ABCD QRQC A"B"A"D" (abcd aeb'f qrst qrb'f a"b"c"d" a"b"gf')
Compass: 11 (18 counting lower drone)
Stylistic features: Tuned E-B-E'-E"
Handwritten: *fingering confused here (in 1st & 2nd beats) **possibly a mistake in 4th beat--actually a false start at 1st beat ***a confused fingering mistake This is all he played, & he evidently considered this a unit. Tuned EBEE
"Bonaparte's Retreat" is a well-known march among fiddlers of the Upper South, and by now it has moved into general circulation as a specialty fiddle tune. The tune is a scion of an old Irish air, "The Eagle's Whistle." Bayard, Hill Country Tunes, #87 gives a Pennsylvania set of "Bonaparte's Retreat" and excellent comparative notes. Petrie, The Complete Collection of Irish Music, #305 and #306 are good Irish examples, and the Journal of the Folk Song Society 2 (1905-6), 88-89 provides two song versions of "The Island of St. Helena" ("Boney's in St. Helena") using the same tune, so clearly the tune was associated with Bonaparte in the British Isles as well as in the American South. For American sets, both published and recorded, see the notes to the performance by Kentuckian W. H. Stepp on the documentary Library of Congress recording American Fiddle Tunes (Library of Congress, AFS L62). The Stepp recording has a special niche in American musical history, since it became the basis for the "Hoedown" in Aaron Copland's music for Rodeo (see "Copland's Kentucky Muse" in Civilization (June/July 1999: 110)).The tuning Henry Reed uses is the old special tuning favored in the Upper South for "Bonaparte's Retreat," transcribed in this collection as EBEE (high to low) and often described in fiddling literature as DADD. Henry Reed's performance is actually tuned somewhere between E and D by current standards. Like Stepp, he uses the lowest string exclusively as a drone. He played this tune because he had been discussing the practice of tuning the fiddle in different tunings, and the fiddle had been placed in the tuning EBEE. He had abandoned the practice of retuning the fiddle at some point as a young man, and though he found ways to convert most tunes to standard tuning that had been previously played in other tunings, a few specialty pieces such as "Bonaparte's Retreat" seem to have been lost along the way. During this session he was experimenting with recovering some of these old specialty pieces.