Eighth of January

Chords you’ll need to know

A D G

Jam-Along Backing Track

Lyrics

In 1814 we took a little trip Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin. There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago. We fired once more and they began to running on Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

We looked down the river and we see'd the British come. And there must have been a hundred of'em beatin' on the drum. They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring. We stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing. Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise If we didn't fire our muskets 'til we looked 'em in the eye We stood quite still 'til we see'd their faces well. Then we opened up our musket guns and really gave them hell Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go. They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

About This Song

Eighth of January (Battle of New Orleans) started out as a traditional fiddle tune, also known as "Jackson's Victory." It's named for January 8, 1815, the day Andrew Jackson's troops beat the British at New Orleans. In the 1940s, folk song collectors recorded it from Oklahoma migrants in California's labor camps, who played it for square dances.

The words came later. Jimmy Driftwood, an Arkansas schoolteacher, wrote them in 1936 to help his students remember their history, and he called the song "The Battle of New Orleans." He recorded it himself for his RCA Victor album Newly Discovered Early American Folk Songs. Johnny Horton then cut a shorter version that he released as a single in 1959. That recording topped both the Billboard pop and country charts and won Driftwood the Grammy for Song of the Year, and it's the version most people learned the words from. Fiddlers still play the old tune on its own, under its old name.