Well, it's not 'old' tradition, but I did try once, with a fife and drum band at old restored Ft. Laramie in Wyoming. We found out rather quickly that a HUGE problem is that fifes are 'generally' easiest to play in the key of Eb...and that is a BUGGER ALL for a fiddler to play in.

I can 'do' it (partly because I was classicaly trained) but it is NOT an easy key to play in, or automatically transpose to in your head. At the time I only knew about 3 tunes in Eb and one of those was Girl I Left Behind/Brighton Camp (THE fife tune) and the other 2 weren't.

The band didn't know either of the other 2 so we promptly gave up. I found a nice tree to fiddle under and the fife/drum band went on with their thing.