"The Tune the Old Cow Died Of" is a dance adaptation of a comic song. The title is a phrase that was used in southwest Pennsylvania to designate any extremely bad piece of music. Interestingly, for a tune possibly derived from a comic song, it is related to the English morris dance tune "The Nutting Girl" which is one of the most well-known morris dance tunes. It was printed in Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle (1981).