Abe's Retreat: A Song History
“Abe’s Retreat” is an old-time reel from West Virginia, a two-part tune in A Mixolydian that fiddlers play in standard tuning or in the cross tunings AEae and GDgd.[1] It also goes by “The Battle of Bull Run” and “Manassas Junction,” and the Traditional Tune Archive takes the Bull Run title as evidence that the “Abe” of the title is Abraham Lincoln, whose Union army was beaten there.[1] That battle, the first full-scale clash of the Civil War, was fought on July 21, 1861, and ended with the routed Union army retreating to Washington.[2] The title is best taken as tune lore: in the sources consulted here, nothing documents when the tune was named or whether it was played during the war.[1]
George N. Barnard, Bull Run, Virginia, albumen silver print from glass negative, 1861–62. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The battlefield named in one of the tune's other titles; the photograph has no connection to the tune.
The Clay County fiddler Wilson Douglas (1922–1999) played it, and Dr. Malvin Artley of Elon College, North Carolina, collected it in the 1950s from Emory Bailey of Calhoun County; that setting later passed into print by way of the Red Clay Ramblers.[1] Harvey Sampson (1909–1991), from Nicut near the Calhoun–Braxton line, learned it from his father and his brother Homer.[1][3] Bill Hicks reported in 1975 that a comparable tune was known to Burl Hammons, another well-known West Virginia fiddler.[1]
The Red Clay Ramblers put the tune on their 1975 Flying Fish album Stolen Love, and Sampson’s own playing was issued with the Big Possum String Band on Augusta Heritage Records.[1] The New Lost City Ramblers included it on There Ain’t No Way Out (Smithsonian Folkways, 1997), with Tracy Schwarz fiddling in GDGD after Sampson’s Augusta recording.[4][5] It also appears in printed tune books, among them the Portland Collection and the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes.[1]
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