Whiskey Before Breakfast

Image of a glass of whiskey before breakfast

Whiskey Before Breakfast is a great old fiddle tune. Years ago it seemed like everybody was recording it. I remember having albums by different artists with various arrangements of the tune. It has certainly become an acoustic standard.

I remember trying to learn it on the guitar, off a Norman Blake album. I had been visiting my sisters in Boulder, Colorado and purchased the album in a little record store downtown, along with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle be Unbroken”. At the time, both those records were impossible to find back home.

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The album title was “Whiskey Before Breakfast”, but it didn’t really seem like the featured song on the record. It was actually the second tune in a two-tune set. In the end, I gave up on it. I was more a finger-picker than a flatpicker. I did come away with something, but it didn’t sound anything like Blake’s arrangement!

Later on, I did figure out a respectable version on banjo, and more recently adapted it to mandolin.

The Tune

I always thought “Whiskey Before Breakfast” was a traditional Irish tune. It would seem that may not be the case. In fact, the tune has been attributed it to the late, great Canadian Metis fiddler Andy DeJarlis. I do know that he recorded the tune on more than one album, and I understand he originally recorded it under a different name (Ok, I read that part on the internet).

However, DeJarlis wrote a lot of other great fiddle tunes as well, like “The Buckskin Reel“, “Sitting Bull”, “Caribou Reel“, “Louis Riel”… and a good number of waltzes and jigs.

Anyway, have a listen to “Whiskey Before Breakfast” on the mandolin at 150 bpm.