Soldier's Joy: A Song History
“Soldier’s Joy” is about as widespread as a fiddle tune can be: the Traditional Tune Archive suggests that none has ever been more popular, and it turns up in almost every tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. One scholar dates it to at least the late eighteenth century, but when it first reached print is disputed. John Glen (1891) and Francis Collinson (1966) gave the earliest printing as Joshua Campbell’s 1778 collection of reels and minuets, though Collinson thought Campbell an unlikely composer, since the tune was a familiar folk dance elsewhere in Europe. The Danish folk dance researcher Per Sørensen, however, has located it in the third volume of Rutherford’s Compleat Collection of country dances, published in Scotland around 1756. It also appeared in James Aird’s 1778 collection and in other books over the next several years, among them a London fife tutor of 1785.[1]
The Stag Dance, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, February 6, 1864. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Union soldiers dancing in winter quarters; the engraving does not show which tune was played.
Robert Burns used the melody twice. He wrote verses to it that were published in The Merry Muses of Caledonia,[1] and in his cantata The Jolly Beggars the opening air, sung by a soldier, is marked for the tune of “Soldier’s Joy.”[1][2] Nearly a century later Thomas Hardy, a fiddler himself, has a fiddler propose it as the proper tune for the occasion in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).[1]
By the 1790s it was being printed in America, in Benjamin and Joseph Carr’s Evening Amusement (Philadelphia, 1796), and it later appeared in Joshua Cushing’s Fifer’s Companion (Salem, Massachusetts, 1804). John Baltzell recorded it for Edison in 1928, and Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers released it on Bluebird in 1934. Nearly every version is in D, and most are played in two repeated parts.[1] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam collection.[3]
Find books with Soldier's Joy for sale →