Annotation:Battle of New Orleans
X:0 T: No Score C: The Traditional Tune Archive M: K: x
BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. American, Reel. USA, Arkansas. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AA'BB'. A 'crooked' (irregular metre in both parts) tune in the repertoire of Arkansas fiddler Absie (sometimes Apsie) Morrison (1876-1964), who recorded with family members in the early 1930's for Victor Records as the Morrison Twin Brothers Band. Morrison, who linked many of his tunes with American military events, claimed to have the fiddle that his Scottish great-grandfather emigrated with prior to the American Revolution. He claimed that another ancestor, John Sidney Morrison, fought with Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and that John Sidney and a black man named Jack (or Bob) Johnson lay in wait, sheltered behind a bale of cotton, until they spied British General Edward Pakenham, whereupon the shot and killed him (actually, Pakenham was slain, by all accounts, when hit by a cannonball) [see Judith Mculloh's article "Uncle Absie Morrison's Historical Tunes," Mid-America Folklore 3 (Winter, 1975, pp. 95-104)].
