“Leather Britches,” often spelled “Leather Breeches,” is an American breakdown, usually played in G, with Scottish roots. The folklorist Samuel Bayard traced it to a widespread Scottish reel generally called “Lord MacDonald’s Reel,” and also linked it to an Irish air known as “The Breeches On” or “The Irish Lad.” Some accounts credit the Scottish reel to Sir Alexander Macdonald (1744–1795), 1st Lord Macdonald, a Skye laird and amateur fiddler. It was printed in Niel Gow’s Third Collection of reels in 1792, and again about 1795 in A Collection of Slow Airs, Strathspeys and Reels, published in London by John and Andrew Gow, the family’s London publishers. American fiddlers generally play the parts in the reverse order. The American tune is closest to the second and fourth parts of the Scottish settings that Gow and others printed.
In parts of the American South and West, “leather breeches” was a name for green beans dried in the pod and cooked later. Many of the verses fiddlers attach to the tune, though, are about trousers. Bayard printed a Greene County, Pennsylvania, rhyme that begins “Leather breeches full of stitches.” The earliest printing under the American title found so far is in numerical tablature. The researcher Paul Gifford located it in R. J. Rudisill’s Music for the Piano Dulcimer, dated 1859.
By the late nineteenth century it was a contest piece. At an 1899 fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, it was a “category tune” that every entrant played. Larkin Hicks of Broadhead, Kentucky, played it at the 1919 Berea contest. The historian Bell Wiley included it among the fiddle tunes of Confederate soldiers in The Life of Johnny Reb. A. B. Moore’s 1934 History of Alabama counted it among the standard tunes of the square-dance fiddler. The collector Marion Thede called it “among the most frequently heard fiddle tunes in the Southwest.”
Records followed quickly. John Baltzell closed an Edison medley with it in 1923. About 7 July 1924, the East Tennessee fiddler “Uncle” Am Stuart, born in 1855 or 1856 by differing accounts, recorded “Leather Breeches” in New York with Gene Austin on banjo. Vocalion issued it on 14841, coupled with “Sally Gooden.” The Leake County Revelers of Mississippi (Columbia 15149, 1927) and Doc Roberts of Kentucky (Silvertone 8176, 1928) also recorded it. Field recordings for the Library of Congress followed. Herbert Halpert recorded it in 1939 from the Mississippi fiddlers John Hatcher, Stephen B. Tucker and Hardy Sharp. In the early 1940s Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers. The tune has stayed in the contest repertoire ever since.
