This proverb is used to defend someone or something older against the assumption that age has worn away their usefulness or ability. An ageing musician, sportsperson, worker or machine is said to be capable of just as fine a performance as a younger counterpart, the instrument standing in for whatever is being judged. It is most often said in reassurance or in mild self-defence, pointing out that experience and condition matter more than raw youth. It is the generous counterpart to the saying there’s no fool like an old fool, a proverb that takes the opposite view of age and mocks an older person for folly their years should have taught them to avoid.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘there’s many a good tune played on an old piano’?
The saying is usually heard with “fiddle” rather than “piano”, and the piano wording is a later substitution of one instrument for another within the same proverb. No record of the “piano” form specifically has been traced, but the history of the underlying saying is reasonably well documented. Nobody knows who coined it, and it has only been found in print from the 1880s onward, though the way it is first used suggests it was already current in speech before that.
The earliest print appearance so far found is in The Anglers’ Journal on 19 September 1885, where the writer treats it as something already familiar rather than a new coinage: “That many a good tune may be played on an old fiddle we have often heard.” By 1888 it was established enough for The Times of India to call it “the old proverb”, writing that “the old proverb proved a true one, that there is many a good tune played on an old fiddle.”
The exact wording was still flexible at this stage. The 1894 novel The Real Charlotte has a character say “there’s many a new tune played on an old fiddle”, swapping “good” for “new” but keeping the same sense. The now-standard wording reached a wider literary audience through Samuel Butler, who wrote “There is many a good tune played on an old fiddle” in his novel The Way of All Flesh, published in 1903.
From “fiddle” the proverb has since been adapted to all sorts of other instruments and objects, piano among them, with the meaning carried over unchanged: that age is no reliable guide to how well something, or someone, can still perform.