Fisher's Hornpipe

Its first known printing is as "Hornpipe #1" in a 1778 London collection of dances by J. Fishar, usually identified as James Fishar, a dancer and ballet master at Covent Garden. Others have credited the German composer Johann Christian Fischer or the English violinist John Abraham Fisher. Within a few years it was everywhere: an American, John Greenwood, wrote it into his flute copybook around 1783, and a fiddler with Moses Cleaveland's surveying party is said to have played it for a dance on their first night camped on the Cuyahoga River.

Early books mostly set it in F, and some Missouri fiddlers still play it there. Most players today use D, while around Galax, Virginia, fiddlers such as Emmett Lundy played it in G.