Under the Double Eagle

String bands took it up in the 1920s. The Blue Ridge Highballers, with Charley La Prada on fiddle, recorded it for Columbia in New York on 23 March 1926 (Columbia 15070-D). Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers recorded it for Paramount in May 1929, with Lonnie Austin on fiddle, Roy Harvey on guitar and Lucy Terry on piano. The Kessinger Brothers of West Virginia recorded it for Brunswick in New York on 14 September 1930. Clark Kessinger came back to it in the 1960s at radio station WCAW in Charleston for the second volume of The Legend of Clark Kessinger. The march was especially popular in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, possibly brought there by German or Austrian immigrants, and there Bill Boyd and His Cowboy Ramblers recorded it at the Texas Hotel in San Antonio on 27 January 1935, with Art Davis on fiddle, and their Bluebird record (B-5945) was the fourth best-selling country record of that year. The Fiddler’s Companion notes that in old-time music it has usually been known as a guitar piece, and that many rural versions stay in one key instead of changing key for the second part.

Bluegrass musicians have recorded it on mandolin, banjo and fiddle. Ray Lunsford, playing electric mandolin, put it on the B-side of a 1956 single for the Excellent label. Don Reno and Red Smiley’s Tennessee Cutups played it at Himmelreich’s Grove in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, on 16 August 1964, with Reno on banjo and Mack Magaha on fiddle, and Reno recorded it again many times in later years. The fiddler Chubby Wise recorded it in Nashville on 13 December 1994, with Bobby Osborne on mandolin and Sonny Osborne on banjo, for his Pinecastle album An American Original.