“Tennessee Wagoner” is one of several names for a breakdown known to fiddlers across the United States. Most often it is plain “Wagoner,” and the state in front changes with the region: Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma. It is usually played in C. The melody is older than any of these titles. George P. Knauff printed it as “The Hero” in the second volume of his Virginia Reels, published in Baltimore in 1839, and some mid-nineteenth-century collections called it “Miss Brown’s Reel.” The collectors R. P. Christeson and Bayard (in Dance to the Fiddle, 1981) both traced it to “The Belle of Claremont Hornpipe.” Bayard also thought the tune was pieced together from older material: its first strain from “Billy in the Lowground,” its second from the Scottish air “The Gaberlunzie Man,” which was printed in 1725.
The Fiddler’s Companion connects the name to Wagner, a Tennessee thoroughbred that raced the horse Grey Eagle at Louisville in the late 1830s. A folio of tunes named for both horses was published after the race. The Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner had another explanation: the tune honoured a Texas cattleman, Dan Wagner. He admitted that some people called it “Tennessee Wagonner,” for reasons he did not know.
The tune was recorded early. Uncle Am Stuart, a fiddler born in Morristown, Tennessee, in 1853, recorded it as “Waggoner” in New York around July 1924, and Vocalion issued it with “Sourwood Mountain” on Vocalion 14840. Guthrie Meade counted twenty-four early 78s of Wagoner-titled tunes, including records by Doc Roberts (1927), Eck Robertson (1929) and Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers (1930). Uncle Jimmy Thompson of Smith County, Tennessee, played it under this title and as “Wagner.” Tradition holds that it was the first tune he played on Nashville’s WSM, at the start of what became the Grand Ole Opry. His earliest documented WSM broadcast is dated 28 November 1925.
Bluegrass bands took it up as a fiddle number. Don Reno and Red Smiley’s Tennessee Cutups played it on a broadcast from station WLOE in Eden, North Carolina, on 17 January 1958, with Mack Magaha on fiddle. Wade Ray’s Country Fiddlers put it on the 1967 Camden LP Down Yonder and Other Old-Time Favorites. New Grass Revival recorded it for When the Storm Is Over (Flying Fish, 1977), and Paul Warren recorded it with Lester Flatt on guitar for his 1978 CMH album America’s Greatest Breakdown Fiddle Player. Mark O’Connor included it on Soppin’ the Gravy (Rounder, 1981).
