“Bill Cheatham” is a breakdown in A major, also spelled “Bill Cheatum,” “Bill Cheatem” and “Cheat ’Em.” The Fiddler’s Companion calls it a common fiddle tune throughout the southern United States, where it probably originated; the Missouri collector R. P. Christeson said he did not hear it in his state until the mid-1940s. The earliest documentation is a fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, in 1899, where it was a “category” tune: each fiddler played a version and the best rendition won a prize. A researcher posting on a fiddle forum has cited a 1901 Kentucky newspaper story about a fiddlers’ contest that mentioned a tune called “Billy Cheatham,” and suggested the name may come from Billy Cheatham, a performer with the Cheatham Brothers’ Black Diamond Minstrels. That is a suggestion, not an established origin.
Texas fiddler Eck Robertson made the earliest known recording. At Victor’s New York studio on 1 July 1922 he cut “Brilliancy and Cheatum,” with Nat Shilkret on piano, but it was never issued. On 11 October 1929 in Dallas he recorded the “Brilliancy Medley,” in which the tune is one part, with his wife Nettie, daughter Daphne and son Dueron; it came out on Victor 40298 in 1930. Blind Joe Mangrum, born in 1853 in Paducah, Kentucky, recorded a version for Victor in 1928, and the Allen Brothers recorded it as “Cheat ’Em.” Arthur Smith and His Dixie Liners recorded “Bill Cheatham” for Bluebird in Atlanta on 7 October 1940 (Bluebird B-8783, issued in 1941).
The Library of Congress holds Henry Reed’s version, recorded by Alan Jabbour at the Reed family home in Glen Lyn, Giles County, Virginia, on 27 August 1966. Its notes say the tune has been popular for much of the twentieth century in the Upper South and has been recorded periodically by country and bluegrass fiddlers, and that Reed’s setting differs consistently from the usual one in the first few notes of the lower strain. The New Lost City Ramblers included it on String Band Instrumentals (Folkways, 1964), learned from recordings by the Red Headed Fiddlers and Eck Robertson, and Kenny Baker played it on Portrait of a Bluegrass Fiddler (County, 1968).
