“Soldier’s Joy” is a country dance, hornpipe and reel that has been played in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States for well over two centuries, almost always in D. The earliest printing yet traced was found by the Danish dance researcher Per Sørensen. It is in the third volume of Rutherford’s Compleat Collection of two hundred of the most Celebrated Country Dances, from around 1756, under the same title, with dance directions and a melody nearly identical to the one played now. The historian Kate Van Winkler Keller found it with a song in London in about 1760. James Aird and Joshua Campbell printed it in 1778 and Skillern in 1780. Older authorities, John Glen and Francis Collinson, took Campbell’s book to be its first appearance. Collinson doubted that Campbell had written it, since it was already a folk dance tune elsewhere in Europe.
In Scotland, Robert Burns set the soldier’s song that opens his cantata The Jolly Beggars to the tune. In England, Henry Robson listed it among popular Northumbrian tunes around 1800. It turned up in the Cotswold morris as “The Morris Reel”, collected at Headington, Oxfordshire. Thomas Hardy has a village fiddler call for it at a dance in Far From the Madding Crowd.
American printings began with Benjamin and Joseph Carr’s Evening Amusement (Philadelphia, 1796). They continued through Joshua Cushing’s Fifer’s Companion (Salem, 1804) and Daniel Steele’s flute preceptor (Albany, 1815). It reached records early. The Victor Band recorded it on 18 June 1917, coupled with “Arkansas Traveler” on Victor 18331. In 1924 came Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis, as “I Am My Mama’s Darling Child”, for Columbia, and Sid Harkreader with Uncle Dave Macon for Vocalion. Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded it for OKeh in 1925, the Blue Ridge Highballers for Columbia on 23 March 1926, and Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers for Columbia on 29 October 1929. In 1939 Herbert Halpert recorded it for the Library of Congress from Mississippi fiddlers.
Its names shift with place and time. The North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell learned it in the early 1920s as “I Love Somebody”. Around Mount Airy it soon became “Soldier’s Joy”, and after the Second World War “Payday in the Army.” In Newfoundland it is sung as “John White”. The Wisconsin fiddler Leizime Brusoe recorded it as “French Four”, after the dance he played it for. What the title first meant is not known. The usual guesses run to money and to drugs, and the Skillet Lickers sang a verse pricing “twenty-five cents for the morphine” alongside the beer.
