Robert from Asheville wrote and asked about the tune history of “Old Piss”, also known by some as as “Few Days” and others as “Old #1”. He said he learned the tune at a jam in Knoxville some years back. Editor’s note: I was not familiar with this tune and do not recall ever hearing it played at a Knoxville jam. I checked with several …let’s call them senior… Knoxville players who told me they knew of the tune, but that it was seldom played. Robert said he was told that the tune was named for a Civil War general. Then this year at Mt. Airy, he was told that “Old Piss” was the name of the sire of Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller. Lee’s horse was indeed named Traveller. However, Traveller’s lineage is well documented, and he was sired by a well known Thoroughbred racehorse named Grey Eagle. Racehorse name theories for this tune pop up occasionally online, but if “Old Piss” was a nickname/stable name for Grey Eagle, it is not documented. While lack of documentation does not prove that the nickname did not exist, there is so much information on Grey Eagle and Traveller that it would be surprising for that spicy detail to not be included somewhere. Sorry, Mt. Airy. Let’s crack open the internet and see what else we can find out about this fife-turned-fiddle-tune in the key of D.

“Old Piss” was a reel or march played by southwest Pennsylvania fifers and was collected by well known musicologist Samuel Bayard. It is published in his book “Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife: Instrumental Folk Tunes in Pennsylvania.” ed. note: Bayard should be familiar to lots of Old Time musicians for his documentation (and book) “Hill Country Tunes, instrumental folk music of southwestern Pennsylvania” which includes Sarah Armstrong. The fact that Bayard was a noted authority on fife music, and wrote that "Old Piss" was one of the best-known tunes among southwest Pennsylvania fifers, lends tremendous credibility to “Old Piss” being a Civil War era (or possibly older) march. Note that Bayard’s oldest listed source for the tune was born in 1881, which is past the Civil War years  of 1861-65, but that’s probably because Bayard (1908-1997) did not begin collecting tunes until 1928, so there were not many Civil War fifers still around then. That being said, documenting the tune itself is the easy part. How about the title?

In his book, Samuel Bayard states "Despite its undesirability, our title for No. 158 [Old Piss] was almost the only one the players ever used. Sometimes the tune was simply called an old march; rarely, it had the name Few Days, indicating some 'floater' tendencies in the title of our No. 154. But whatever its usual name, the tune was one of the best-known among the southwest Pennsylvania fifers." Fiddler Paul Kirk writes regarding the origin of the title, “One was told to me from some friends in Bradford, PA, and that story goes that the title is an homage to a general whose surname was something like Pisselli, and that he was known as "Old Piss" for short.” In a Banjo Hangout discussion forum from 2021, participant “matchbookholder” writes, “I did a little research and found that Christian R. Pisle of Franklin County (South Central PA - Chambersburg) was a Captain in the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry, Company I, in late 1863.” So the tune title referring to an officer’s nickname remains a very good possibility. 

While the tune itself is very well documented, there’s not a whole lot more information on the title. Recall that Brayard wrote about the title’s ”undesirability.” It is entirely reasonable to assume that because the tune’s title was not considered to be “proper,” other writers and musicologists were reluctant to do further research - especially if they were trying to get published or were worried about offending others. While "Old Piss" is probably fairly tame on the offensive title scale today, the tune is now often diplomatically referred to as "Old #1", which also allows us to satisfy our need for juvenile scatological humor.

Old Piss

Chuck Levy and Jay Gimellii