“Paddy on the Turnpike” is an old reel with branches in Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States. In his 1981 collection Dance to the Fiddle, Bayard traced it to a once well-known Scottish song air, “The Waukin o’ the Fauld.” He judged from its wide spread, its many names and the way it turns up in more than one mode that the tune had some age, though he could not trace it before the early eighteenth century. It was in the United States by 1842, when Ruben Fisher of Ohio wrote it into his music notebook in a minor, modal setting. It was printed in a Howe collection of 1864, in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection in 1883 and in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland in 1903. It has gathered many other names, among them “Paddy on the Handcar,” “The Bunch of Keys” and “The Flowers of Limerick.”
The tune now runs in two broad families. One is dorian or minor in sound. Bayard found it the usual form in western Pennsylvania, and it is the common form in Irish and Scottish playing. On Prince Edward Island it was one of the best-known old tunes until a major-key version grew up there in the 1920s. The other family is major or mixolydian and is found across much of the United States, from Virginia and West Virginia to Oklahoma and Nebraska, more often in A than in G. Even that splits further. Wilson Douglas, a fiddler from Clay County, West Virginia, said the West Virginia “Paddy” was different from the one played in Kentucky and North Carolina, with “a hornpipe time” and a drone, and credited it to the Carpenter and Hammons fiddling families. In Missouri, Bob Holt remembered that his grandfather kept travelling fiddlers up all night, and the tune he always wanted was “Paddy on the Turnpike.” The title also wandered: Fiddlin’ Cowan Powers of Virginia and Clark Kessinger of West Virginia each attached it to a different tune in C.
One of the earliest records under the name was made in April 1923 by the fiddler Patrick J. Gaffny, a violin solo with piano issued on OKeh 21013. The fiddler Tommy Jackson put it on a Dot single in April 1955, backed with “Blackberry Blossom.” The Dillards recorded it with Byron Berline for Pickin’ & Fiddlin’ (Elektra, 1965). Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys cut it in Nashville on 3 November 1966, with Richard Greene on fiddle. Monroe played it again as a mandolin and guitar duet with Doc Watson at the White House on 7 August 1980, and that performance was issued in 1993 on Live Duet Recordings 1963–1980.
