“Fiddler’s Dram” reached most guitar players through Norman Blake, who recorded it for his 1976 Rounder album Whiskey Before Breakfast (Rounder 0063), run straight into the album’s title tune as a single track. Eleven years later he and Tony Rice recorded the same pairing for Blake & Rice (Rounder 0233, 1987) at Bias Recording Studios in Springfield, Virginia, with Rice on guitar and Blake on mandolin. On the banjo, Béla Fleck recorded it at Lemco Studios in Lexington, Kentucky, in January 1980, with Sam Bush on fiddle, Jimmy Gaudreau on mandolin, Glenn Lawson on guitar and Mark Schatz on bass, for the Rounder album Fiddle Tunes for Banjo that he shared with Bill Keith and Tony Trischka.
The title is older than any of these records, and in the fiddle collections it belongs to more than one tune. The Fiddler’s Companion lists a “Fiddler’s Dram” as an old-time breakdown in G major known in central West Virginia and northeastern Alabama. A.B. Moore’s History of Alabama (1934) counted it among the standard tunes of the square-dance fiddler, and the Calhoun County, West Virginia, fiddler Harvey Sampson, who learned it from his father and sometimes played it in DGdg tuning, recorded it with the Big Possum String Band in 1986. A different breakdown, “Give the Fiddler a Dram,” also goes by “Fiddlers Dram.” In 1929 the Fayette Northwest Alabamian listed it among the tunes likely to be heard at an upcoming fiddlers’ convention; it was played at a contest in LaFollette, Tennessee, in 1931, and was recorded for the Library of Congress in 1939 from the Mississippi fiddler W.E. Claunch.
The tune Blake paired it with has a history of its own. “Whiskey Before Breakfast” came from Canada: it is generally credited to the Manitoba fiddler Andy de Jarlis, who published it in 1957 in Canadian Fiddle Tunes from Red River Valley, where he is credited only with the arrangement.
