View source for Annotation:Shoot Two Bits

{{TuneAnnotation
|f_annotation='''SHOOT TWO BITS.''' AKA - "Two Bits." American, Reel (2/4 or cut time). USA; Nebraska, Missiouri.  D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. 'Two bits' is a colloquial term for a quarter, though not in common use in modern times. It refers to a time when coinage, particularly silver dollars, could be physically broken up into pie-shaped parts and used as legal tender (the "pirate" term "pieces of eight" derives from the same use). 'Shoot two-bits', however, was a term for a wager in dice games, though with various meanings. 'Shoot two bits' could refer to a game with very low wagers, as it was used by writer Ian Fleming in his '''Diamonds are Forever''':
<blockquote>
''But the killer was extended the liberty of the place as long as he paid off and held an intrest in a local institution.'' 
''It could be a house of prostitution or a backroom crap game where the busted could shoot two bits.''
</blockquote>
One could also shoot a nickel or dime.  Alternatively, 'two-bits' could also refer colloquially to twenty-five dollars ($25.00), as employed by writer Daschell Hammett in '''The Glass Key''':
<blockquote> 
''Harry Sloss picked up the dice and rattled them in a pale broad hairy hand. "Shoot two bits," He dropped'' 
''a twenty-dollar bill and a five-dollar bill on the table.''
</blockquote>
[[File:walters.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Bob Walters]] Collector Bob Christeson remarked that his source for the tune, champion Nebraska fiddler Bob Walters (1889-1960) credited the tune to Oscar Doty, "a retiree in Missouri Valley, Iowa. Mr. Doty had a high-priced violin he had acquired from a member of the Omaha Symphony, and he played it in 1951 at the annual get-together for fiddlers sponsored by Mr. Frame Davis in Des Moines, Iowa." 
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The second strain begins similarly to that of Walters' own "[[Bob Walter's Hornpipe]]."
|f_source_for_notated_version=[[biography:Bob_Walters]] (Burt County, Nebraska) [Phillips]; Oscar Doty (Missouri Valley, Iowa) via Bob Walters (Burt County, Nebraska) [Christeson].
|f_printed_sources=R.P. Christeson ('''Old Time Fiddlers’ Repertory, vol. 1'''), 1973; No. 85, p. 62 (appears as "Two Bits"). Phillips ('''Traditional American Fiddle Tunes vol. 1'''), 1994; p. 221.
|f_recorded_sources=Missouri State Old Time Fiddlers' Association, Bob Walters (1889-1960) - "Drunken Wagoneer." Univ. of Missouri Press, Bob Walters - "Old Time Fiddlers' Repertory" (1976. Various artists).
|f_see_also_listing=Hear/see Charlie Walden teach the tune [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OQgtNohI24] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIj32KlMcs0]
|f_tune_annotation_title=https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Shoot_Two_Bits >
}}
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