Big-Eyed Rabbit: A Song History

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The earliest recording of "Big-Eyed Rabbit" found in the sources consulted here was made in New York on April 22, 1924, when two musicians from Silva, North Carolina, Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis, cut it for Columbia with fiddle and banjo.[1][2][3] Columbia released it that August with "Wild Bill Jones" on the other side.[3] Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett's string-band sides had already appeared in June, but the Bumgarner–Davis discs still rank among the earliest records of southern music, and they were the first by women performers.[3] Fifteen years later, in May 1939, the Library of Congress recorded the tune in Quitman, Mississippi, from fiddler Charles Long, with Sam Neal beating straws on the strings.[1]

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait painting of three rabbits in grass beside a fallen log

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Rabbits on a Log, oil on canvas, 1897. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The words follow a rabbit hunt: hounds take up the trail, the hunter has his gun ready, the big-eyed quarry is chased and then cooked, and one verse turns to a sweetheart with shining eyes.[1][4][5] Choruses vary from one singer to the next.[5] The verses and the fiddle melody did not always travel together. According to the Traditional Tune Archive, the Bumgarner recording uses a different tune from the one Tommy Jarrell later fiddled.[4] The title has also been used for other music, including an unrelated C-major rag that Alabama's Stripling Brothers wrote and recorded for Vocalion in 1929.[6]

The tune stayed popular in the Round Peak area of North Carolina and around Galax, Virginia. Jarrell learned it from his father, Ben Jarrell, and Kirk Sutphin learned it from him.[1] Jarrell's version is an A-major breakdown, often fiddled in AEae cross-tuning. He recorded it on Joke on the Puppy (Mountain, 1976), and Sutphin included it on Old Roots and New Branches (County, 1994).[5] A G-major version from William Marshall of Carroll County, Virginia, belongs to the same tune family as "John Brown's Dream" and "Little Rabbit."[7] All three titles appear in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[8]

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Sources

  1. Birthplace of Country Music: "Chasing Down the 'Big-Eyed Rabbit'".
  2. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UC Santa Barbara): "Columbia matrix 81710. Big-eyed rabbit / Samantha Bumgarner ; Eva Davis".
  3. Native Ground Books & Music: "Samantha Bumgarner: The Original Banjo Pickin' Girl".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Big Eyed Rabbit (3)".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Big Eyed Rabbit (2)".
  6. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Big Eyed Rabbit (4)".
  7. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Big Eyed Rabbit (1)".
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".