Hoedown

In October 1937, in the town of Saylersville in Magoffin County, Kentucky, Alan Lomax recorded William Hamilton Stepp playing a fiddle tune called “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” or as he identifies it in the recording, “the Bonaparte.”

You can listen here or here.

Some years later, Aaron Copland found a transcript of the recording in a book:

Composer Aaron Copland, who was commissioned by choreographer Agnes De Mille to score the ballet in 1942, probably did not hear the original field recording before adapting it. Instead, he likely learned the tune from the book Our Singing Country (1941), which presented transcriptions of John and Alan Lomax’s field recordings prepared by the composer and musicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger. According to Jabbour, “when Aaron Copland was looking for a suitable musical theme for the ‘Hoedown’ section of his ballet Rodeo (first produced in 1942), his eye was caught by the version in the Lomax book, and he adopted it almost [note] for note as the principal theme.”

(source)

In 1972, Emerson Lake & Palmer recorded an electronic version:

Some years after that, in 1993, I heard the tune on TV in a “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” commercial. They play “Hoedown” from Copland’s Rodeo all the time on KUSC.

I note all this because I’m interested in transmissions from the past to the present. Fiddle tune -> recording -> transcription -> orchestral score -> recording -> TV commercial is an cool lineage.