# Music by Genre > Old-Time, Roots, Early Country, Cajun, Tex-Mex >  Spotted pony

## sgarrity

Man, the old time section of the cafe is dead!!
Let's revive it and talk about some good tunes to play on the mandolin. Spotted Pony is one that I like but have never learned. Who plays some good versions of this one?

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## bradeinhorn

todd phillips

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## Lefty&French

Yes, Todd Phillips  
(with a little help from Mike Marshall, Tony Trischka, Scott Nygaard, Darol Anger, Tim O'Brien, Stuart Duncan, John Reischman and Laurie Lewis)
"IN THE PINES" 1995 Gourd Music.
IMHO, a desert island album!

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## bradeinhorn

i just went to that album after my post, and am in he process of listening straight through.....again.. so good.

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## sgarrity

How did I miss that one?? lol That is a great recording. I learned Liza Jane off of it. Now I'll have to go back and have a listen to Spotted Pony.

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## fatt-dad

Shaun, Tripp and the rest of the Cary St. folks play Spotted Pony. I'm usually on board by the second lap or so. . .

f-d

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## pasturepicker

Lynn Morris used to do it.

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## John Ritchhart

I do.

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## Paul Kotapish

"Spotted Pony" is one of the first fiddle tunes I learned to play on the mandolin 30-some years ago. It's a great little tune. For another fun "horse" tune, try to dig up a setting of "Single-Footing Horse" from Fiddlin' Arthur Smith. Both tunes are in the Phillips Collection of Traditional American Fiddle Tunes.

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## Pete Martin

The Texas style fiddlers call it Snowshoes and it is on a lot of recordings by those guys. I'll put it in Mandolin Magazine in a near future issue.

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## JeffD

> from Fiddlin' Arthur Smith. Both tunes are in the Phillips Collection of Traditional American Fiddle Tunes.


I have both volumes of that tunebook - and it has become a favorite.

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## mandogerry

I think there is supposed to be a second volume of the Phillips traditional tunes, but Elderly doesn't seem to have it, just the waltz and #jig volumes that are billed as followups to volume 2 (at least, that's how I read the blurbs). Does anybody actually have Volume 2?

Love Spotted Pony. Our (very) amateur group plays it a lot, since we all have horses.

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## acousticphd

> "Spotted Pony" is one of the first fiddle tunes I learned to play on the mandolin 30-some years ago. It's a great little tune. For another fun "horse" tune, try to dig up a setting of "Single-Footing Horse" from Fiddlin' Arthur Smith. Both tunes are in the Phillips Collection of Traditional American Fiddle Tunes.


This is one of my favorite tunes learned in the last few years, and I also first heard it from the "In the Pines" CD with Mike Marshall playing mandolin on that cut. #Last year, the Nashville fiddler David Coe put out a CD with the same tune entitled "Snowshoes". #It can be found on Amazon I believe. #This was a duet album with Irish bouzouki player Frances Cunningham, that I can highly recommend. Great renditions of traditional fiddle tunes with fiddle and bouzouki, and a bit of mandolin. #

I also read somewhere recently that the tune "Snowshoes" was misidentified or misnamed by someone back in the past, and that tune came by the name "Spotted Pony" as a result, and have heard this from a couple musicians here as well. #Paul, have you, or anyone else, heard that story?

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## Paul Kotapish

> I also read somewhere recently that the tune "Snowshoes" was misidentified or misnamed by someone back in the past, and that tune came by the name "Spotted Pony" as a result, and have heard this from a couple musicians here as well. #Paul, have you, or anyone else, heard that story?


I haven't heard that story, but it's not uncommon for the same tune to have many different names--or for the same name to have many tunes associated with it.

For example, the tune (and many variants) that I call "Red Haired Boy" is also known as "The Red-Headed Irishman," "Soldier with a Wooden Leg," "The Duck Chewed Tobacco," "Gilder Roy," "Guilderoy," "Gilda Roy," "Gilroy," "Gilderoy's Reel," "Injun Et a Woodchuck," "Mairi ban Og," "Nellie On the Shore," "The Old Soldier," "Wooden Leg," and "Black Rock," and probably others, too.

"Duck River" is also known as "Big Mule" and "Dubuque." (There are folks who play all three as slightly separate tunes, but they are really almost identical melodies.)

Conversely, I know several different tunes that all bear the moniker "Ducks on the Pond." Same with "Billy in the Lowground," "Salt River," "Ways of the World," "Shelvin' Rock," and a great many other tunes. Very different melodies in different modes and keys all bearing the same name.

"Sally Ann" goes both ways--there are many different tunes going by that name, and some of the tunes by that name also have other names.

It's always tricky to ferret out whether the different names are the result of an accident or simple coincidence. I suspect that a lot of different tunesmiths inadvertantly pen tunes that are quite similar to scads of other melodies that they may or may not have heard before and give them a distinctive name. Or for fiddlers to learn a melody without learning the name of "original" name and then just give it a name to keep track of it.

In the 20th Century it was not uncommon for folkies learning tunes from old acetates, tapes, transcriptions, and other arcane secondary sources to mistakenly apply the name for one tune in a medley for another one. If a musicologist did a field recording of a rural fiddler and mistakenly jotted down the name or the tune or order of the tunes incorrectly, that mistake was often passed down over time as subsequent scholars and tune enthusiasts associated learned the music from that session.

One familiar example of this is Eck obertson's "Brilliancy" medley, which varied over time and depending on his whim at a give performance. The basic medley included all or parts of "Drunken Billygoat," "Wake Up Susan," "Old Billy Wilson" (AKA "Little Billy Wilson"), and "Bill Cheatum," but it also bears resemblance to parts of "Liverpool Hornpipe," "Louisville Hornpipe," "Passaic Hornpipe," "Butterfly Hornpipe," "Dew Drop," "Miller's Reel," and several other tunes.

Subsequent fiddlers and mandolinists have codified various versions over the years that are now called "Brilliancy" or the "Brilliancy Medley," and there is no single "correct" version.

And sometimes names get changes through the "telephone" process. I heard the name for Tommy Jarrell's tune "Doggy on the Carpet" metamorphose into "Froggy in the Carport" into "Foggy at the Airport" over the course of one party some years ago.

This stuff is fun . . . and confusing! Long live the folk process.

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## forestabri

I used to play it. How's it go again?

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## JeffD

> #Spotted Pony is one that I like but have never learned. #Who plays some good versions of this one?


I didn't when you posted this, but I do now. Love the tune.

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## woodwizard

Just learned thaten' recently as well. I like it but it seems not very many people play it or have heard of it around here.

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## John Ritchhart

Anybody doing Little Rabbit? Good old time tune.

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## JeffD

> I think there is supposed to be a second volume of the Phillips traditional tunes, but Elderly doesn't seem to have it, just the waltz and #jig volumes that are billed as followups to volume 2 (at least, that's how I read the blurbs). Does anybody actually have Volume 2?


Yes I have it. I think I use volume 2 a little more often than volume 1 actually.

There is a lot of fun stuff in there.

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## JeffD

> Anybody doing Little Rabbit? Good old time tune.


Haven't heard it, I will do some tune research (my favorite kind) first thing in the morning.

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## woodwizard

> Anybody doing Little Rabbit? Good old time tune.


Yep! I play that one. Great tune! There's so many terrific old time tunes.
Back to Spotted Pony ... It seems that the B part always gets listeners attention. It sort of bops along like Blackberry Blossum and is pretty.

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## DryBones

Butch Baldassari does Little Rabbit on one of his DVD's, breaks it down real nice for you...all 5 parts!

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## Barb Friedland

I love Spotted Pony! I'm working on putting it together with a neat little tune called Planxty Gormley. Spotted Pony is available as a TablEdit file at the MandoZine site. It seems like a pretty good version.

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## woodwizard

> I love Spotted Pony! I'm working on putting it together with a neat little tune called Planxty Gormley. Spotted Pony is available as a TablEdit file at the MandoZine site. It seems like a pretty good version.


I think that's a pretty good version on there too. That's where I started when I decided to learn that tune as well as listening to as many versions as I could ... mp3's, youtube etc.  there's also a couple of good versions on there of  "The New Five cents" another good fiddle tune.  :Smile:

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## Susanne

> Anybody doing Little Rabbit? Good old time tune.


I absolutely LOVE this tune!! I've been working on it a bit on the fiddle, and also on the mandolin, still need to do a lot of work but I love working on it!
Spotted Pony is a lovely tune that is one of my regulars right now. And, the guy who started this thread, thanks for reviving the oldtime forum!

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