“Bonaparte’s Retreat” is an old-time fiddle tune collected across a wide stretch of the United States, from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri through Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia to West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most versions are in D major, and fiddlers often play it in cross tunings such as DDad. The versions differ a good deal from region to region, some in two parts and some in several. Many older players treated it as a piece of scene-painting, starting at a slow march tempo and speeding up to suggest a retreating army. The collector Ira Ford, writing in 1940, described fiddlers drumming on the strings with the back of the bow to imitate musket fire and using pizzicato for the boom of cannon. The Arkansas fiddler Absie Morrison called it bagpipe music on the fiddle, and “French music.”
The melody itself points to Ireland. The folklorist Samuel Bayard, who found it still current among western Pennsylvania fiddlers, traced it in 1944 to an old Irish march, “The Eagle’s Whistle.” P. W. Joyce had described that march as the marching tune of the O’Donovan family. The ethnomusicologist Linda Burman-Hall also gave it Irish origins, although the printed Irish variants she found dated only from 1872 onward. In Pennsylvania some sets were remade into the alternating slow and fast “Old Man and Old Woman Quarrelin’,” and F. P. Provance of Point Marion, Pennsylvania, told Bayard that the fifer he learned it from had played it as a retreat in Civil War days.
The first sound recording was made by the north Georgia fiddler A. A. Gray. He had taken third place with it at the 1920 Georgia Old Time Fiddlers’ Association contest in Atlanta, and in 1924 he recorded it as a solo for OKeh (OKeh 40110). Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers recorded it in 1929 and the Arthur Smith Trio in 1936. In 1937 Alan Lomax recorded the Magoffin County, Kentucky, fiddler William H. Stepp playing it for the Library of Congress. Stepp’s version has since become the source of many revival fiddlers’ settings.
Ruth Crawford Seeger transcribed Stepp’s performance for John and Alan Lomax’s book Our Singing Country (1941), where it is titled “Bonyparte.” Aaron Copland built the main theme of the “Hoe-Down” in his ballet Rodeo, first performed in October 1942, on Stepp’s version, most likely working from that transcription. In 2016 the Library of Congress added Stepp’s recording to its National Recording Registry, describing it as a variation that musicologists believe laid the groundwork for Copland’s piece.
