Every jam assumes a shared songbook nobody ever hands you. This index is that songbook's table of contents: the standards a circle will call, the key they are usually called in, and — because every tune already has a deep home on one of the instrument sites — where each one is actually taught.
A shared repertoire is what turns a circle of strangers into a band for three minutes. Nothing is rehearsed; what stands in for rehearsal is that everyone has independently learned the same few dozen tunes, off broadly the same recordings, in the same keys, with the same shape. Call one of those and eight people who have never met play an arrangement together. Call something outside it and you get the same eight people learning a tune in public, which is a different and considerably slower evening.
The list is regional and it drifts. A circle in one town will have four tunes nobody plays two counties away, and every jam keeps half a dozen local favourites that would baffle a visitor. What does not drift is the core: a few dozen fiddle tunes and standards that turn up wherever this music is played, in keys so settled that the key has become part of the tune's name in conversation.
The index
| Tune | Called in | Meter | Usually kicked by | Taught at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas Traveler | D major | 4/4 | fiddle | Fiddle Warrior |
| June Apple | A mixolydian | 4/4 | fiddle | Fiddle Warrior |
| Shady Grove | D dorian | 4/4 | mandolin | Fiddle Warrior |
| Blackberry Blossom | G major | 4/4 | fiddle | Fiddle Warrior |
| Soldier's Joy | D major | 4/4 | fiddle | Mandolin Warrior |
| Old Joe Clark | A mixolydian | 4/4 | banjo | Mandolin Warrior |
| Angeline the Baker | D major | 4/4 | mandolin | Mandolin Warrior |
| Cripple Creek | A major | 4/4 | banjo | Mandolin Warrior |
| Whiskey Before Breakfast | D major | 4/4 | guitar | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
| Red-Haired Boy | A mixolydian | 4/4 | fiddle | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
| Sally Goodin | A major | 4/4 | fiddle | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
| Big Sciota | G major | 4/4 | guitar | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
| Cluck Old Hen | A mixolydian | 4/4 | fiddle | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
| Boil Them Cabbage Down | A major | 4/4 | fiddle | index only (no tune page anywhere on the network yet) |
The shape of it: fiddle tunes like Soldier’s Joy and Old Joe Clark in their fiddle keys, banjo vehicles like Cripple Creek, and the common-stock standards every circle shares. Provenance is part of the contract — every index-only row above is a traditional or public-domain tune, vetted before it earned a line.
Two columns repay a second look. “Called in” is not trivia: the key is part of a tune's identity here, and calling one of these somewhere unusual gets you a raised eyebrow and, more practically, breaks that sound wrong — because the phrases everybody plays on it were learned in the standard key and lose their ring anywhere else. “Usually kicked by” is much softer. It records which seat the melody sits most naturally with, not who is permitted to start it.
Modes turn up more often than a newcomer expects. Several of these sit in mixolydian or dorian rather than plain major, which in the room means a flat-VII where your ear was waiting for a V, or a minor colour that stubbornly refuses to resolve. You do not need any theory to play them. You need to know that the strange chord you just heard was correct and that nobody wants you to fix it.
Learning the book
The way in is not to learn forty tunes. It is to learn four of them properly — melody, changes, and the ability to hear which part of the form you are in with your eyes shut — and then to keep showing up. The rest arrives by exposure, because these tunes share a small pool of chord movements and phrase shapes, and the fifth one you learn will take a fraction of the time the first one did.
Chords first, melody later, is the unglamorous advice that actually works. Someone who can hold the changes to twenty standards is useful in any circle from their first night; someone who can play the melody of two and nothing else is a spectator for the rest of the evening. The breaks come along later, and they come faster than you would think, because by then you already know how these tunes are built.
Why there are no tune pages here
Deliberate. A tune's melody, its licks and its arrangements belong to the instrument that leads it, and those pages already exist on the sister sites. This site indexes the jam's conventions around each tune; it does not republish the tune. One home per tune, like one home per instrument.
The argument is worth making out loud, because the rule costs this site traffic. A page per tune here would rank, and it would be a worse page than the one already living on the site that owns the instrument — a tune is taught through hands, and the fiddle's bowing, the mandolin's phrasing and the banjo's arrangement of the same melody are three genuinely different lessons. Publishing a thin blend of all three under one roof is the definition of a doorway page, and the network's answer to that temptation is a validator rather than a good intention.
So the last column is the point of the table, not a courtesy. Where a sister site teaches the tune, the row links there and this page says nothing further about it. Where nobody on the network teaches it yet, the row says so plainly, and the day somebody publishes it the row gains a link — and the tune still has exactly one home.