Annotation:Asey's Piece

Find traditional instrumental music

Back to Asey's Piece


ASEY'S PIECE. AKA and see "Oho Oho I've Found You Out," "Hunnell's Double Drag." American, Jig. USA, Pa. A Mixolydian. Standard tuning. AB. The title comes from "its being a favorite piece of Asa Sellers, a crippled cobbler of Waynesburg, Greene County, who was a devoted and famed fifer, and used to march, with a pronounced limp, in every martial-band parade possible" (Bayard). Bayard says that while the piece appears seldom in collections, it was once widely known along both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and was one of the best-known fife tunes. Bayard traces the tune to Northumberland where it appears in Bruce and Stokoe's Northumbrian Minstrelsy as "O I hae seen the roses blaw". O'Neill has a version as "Ellis' Jig", and one called "Mason's Quickstep" can be found in the American Veteran Fifer (No. 23).

Source for notated version: Charles Ganiear (orig. Greene County, Pa.) [Bayard].

Printed sources: Bayard (Dance to the Fiddle), 1981; No. 610B, p. 540.

Recorded sources:




Back to Asey's Piece