In Ireland this reel is “The Teetotaller”, and in North America it is usually “Temperance Reel”. Both names come from the nineteenth-century campaign against drink. “Teetotal” entered temperance speech in the early 1830s, when Richard “Dicky” Turner, a working man of Preston in Lancashire, argued that nothing short of total abstinence would do. The word may simply double the T of “total” for emphasis; tune lore prefers to hear a stammered “te-te-total”. In most versions the tune is in G, and its second part turns toward E minor.
An early manuscript copy survives among the tunes gathered by James Goodman (1828–1896), a Church of Ireland clergyman and uilleann piper from Dingle, County Kerry. By 1866 he had filled several volumes, noting many tunes from Munster pipers and copying others from print. His “Teetotallers Reel” is in the first volume, and his modern editors match it to R. M. Levey’s printed collection of Irish dance music. In America it appears in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (1883), and Francis O’Neill printed it in 1907 as “The Teetotaler’s Fancy”. The Kerry fiddler Pádraig O’Keeffe played a version he called “The Road to Newbridge”.
It came onto records early. The Brooklyn-born accordionist John J. Kimmel recorded its first part in 1915, in a medley between “The Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Mason’s Apron”. The Fiddler’s Companion, following Meade, gives 1919 for a recording by Joseph Samuels, a Tennessee-born New York violinist and bandleader.
Among American fiddlers the tune took on local names. Kentucky’s Doc Roberts called it “Devil in Georgia”. Ira Ford printed it as “Six Hand Reel” in 1940. In Missouri it was “Rocky Road to Denver” to Roy Wooliver and Gene Goforth and “Where Is My Other Foot?” to Lonnie Robertson. The West Virginia fiddler Frank George passed it to John McCutcheon, who recorded it in 1977. Kenny Baker recorded it for County, and Tony Rice made it the closing track of his 1977 Rounder album Tony Rice. Rice recorded it in Berkeley in July 1976 with David Grisman on mandolin, Richard Greene on fiddle and Todd Phillips on bass.
