Miller’s Reel

Howe printed it without a title, among the schottisches, in his 1000 Jigs and Reels of about 1867. When it appeared under the name “Miller’s Reel” in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (1883), and later in Cole’s 1000 Fiddle Tunes (1940), those books credited the tune to Zeke Backus, a New England bandleader and composer who had also worked as a minstrel performer. By then the tune had been in print, untitled, for some sixteen years.

Twentieth-century collectors found it from Pennsylvania to Iowa. Bayard’s Dance to the Fiddle prints a version from a Pennsylvania fiddler noted in 1948, and R. P. Christeson printed one from Frame Davis of Des Moines, Iowa. The Missouri fiddler Lonnie Robertson recorded it in the mid-1960s. Lue Berline played it at the fiddle contest in Weiser, Idaho, in 1964, and his son Byron Berline, who learned it from him, later recorded it for his Rounder album Dad’s Favorites. In South Carolina, Snuffy Jenkins and the Hired Hands recorded it in October 1962 at radio station WIS in Columbia, with Homer “Pappy” Sherrill on fiddle.

A related Kentucky tune of the same name is in G. Jay Ungar learned it from the fiddler J. P. Fraley of Rush, Kentucky, and recorded it on Catskill Mountain Goose Chase (Philo, 1977).