"Just about every old time fiddler I've met knows the tune 'Soldier's Joy.' It's one of the real standards, played in dozens of styles, all over the country. When my Cherokee friend Bob Thomas was alive, he would always request that tune for jig dancing. One day his son Stanley told me why. It seems that when the Cherokee veterans of the Civil War returned to Tahlequah, in Indian Territory, they were greeted by musicians playing that tune. And ever after, when those old men would get together, there would be a fiddler playing 'Soldier's Joy' as an honoring song."

--Jim Griffith, Tucson, Arizona