“Cherokee Shuffle” is usually credited to the fiddler Tommy Jackson. The earliest recording found under that title is his, made on 14 November 1957 and released in 1958 on the Dot album Square Dance Tonight! (DLP 3085). The tune itself is older. The banjo player Howard Bursen, the fiddler Kerry Blech and others trace it to “Lonesome Indian,” a tune associated with Tommy Magness. Jackson is generally credited with moving Magness’s tune from D to A and adding a distinctive second part of his own.
Magness, who had recorded with Bill Monroe, recorded “Lonesome Indian” with Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys at Castle Studio in Nashville on 15 January 1949. Columbia issued it on 20560, backed with “Gray Eagle.” Blech says the Magness tune came to be called “Lost Indian,” especially among older fiddlers in North Carolina and Virginia. Some of them borrowed Jackson’s new part and transposed it onto the Magness tune. The North Carolina “Lost Indian” is known as a local melody of Surry County and is similar in many ways to “Cherokee Shuffle.” The fiddler Glen Smith learned his version from Magness. Kenny Baker and Clark Kessinger also recorded it under the “Lost Indian” name. That name has long been a floater among older fiddlers, attached to many tunes that have more in common by their AEac# tuning than by their melodies.
The two tunes have kept blurring into each other. “Cherokee Shuffle” is sometimes played in D as well as A, and two forms circulate, one “square” and one not. The old-time tune “Colored Aristocracy” has also been heard as a relative. The tune was taken up by old-time revival bands, among them the Old Reliable String Band on Folkways and Norman Blake’s Rising Fawn String Ensemble on Rounder. It was also played by bluegrass bands and fiddlers, from the Osborne Brothers to Tex Logan with the Charles River Valley Boys.
