BONAPARTE'S RETREAT
Created on 03/11/2005Latest update on 26/10/2023
Artist: A.A. Gray
Author: traditional
Label: Okeh
Year: 1924
North Georgia fiddler (1881-1939) who won third place honors at the 1920 Georgia Old Time Fiddler's Association state contest in Atlanta and four years later recorded it as a solo fiddle tune. Pre Civil War fife & drum corps march instrumental.
Covers:
- 1929:
Crockett Family Mountaineers [role model for Pee Wee King's later hit version]
- 1929:
- 1936:
- 1936:
- 1937:
William H. Stepp [from Kentucky; Library of Congress recording transcribed by Ruth Crawford Seeger and collected in John & Alan Lomax's songbook Our Singing Country (1941)]
- 1942:
Aaron Copland [using the Stepp version for the Rodeo theme of his suite Hoedown]
- 1949:
Pee Wee King [top 10 C&W; lyrics and vocal: Redd Stewart]
- 1950:
- 1950:
- 1950:
- 1954:
Jean Ritchie [on album Field Trip]
- 1957:
- 1959:
Norman Edmunds [Lomax recording]
- 1959:
- 1960:
Watson Family [with Doc Watson]
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1962:
- 1963:
Isaac Stern [as Hoedown]
- 1964:
- 1964:
- 1967:
- 1969:
- 1970:
- 1972:
Glen Campbell [top 3 C&W]
- 1972:
- 1972:
Emerson, Lake & Palmer [as Hoedown; they also cut Copland's Fanfare For The Common Man]
- 1975:
- 1976:
- 1978:
- 1978:
- 1998:
Wyclef Jean [with extra lyrics from Haiti]
- 1999:
- 1999:
- 2002:
Bela Fleck [as Hoedown]
- 2023:
Scion of an old Irish air (The Eagle's Whistle). The Island Of St. Helena (Boney's In St. Helena) used the same tune. The Retreat in question is 'Boney' Napoleon's final retreat, the island of St. Helena. Many Irish served in his army (with England as a common enemy).
