Cluck Old Hen: A Song History

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"Cluck Old Hen" is well known throughout the Appalachian South, both as a song and as a tune for fiddle and banjo.[1][2] Its verses drift freely from one singer to the next, while the refrain, about a hen that has quit laying, holds fairly steady.[3] It is number 4235 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[3][4] Nobody knows where it began. The Traditional Tune Archive reports that folk-music researcher Mike Yates found the earliest text he had seen dated to 1886, in an article on South Texas work songs printed in Rainbow in the Morning (1926), a volume of the Texas Folklore Society.[1][5] Fiddlers usually play it in A, and it is generally described as dorian or mixolydian.[1][2][3] Some retune to AEae; Mount Airy, North Carolina, fiddler Tommy Jarrell placed it in the "old-timey tuning of A."[1] On the fiddle, the hen's "cluck" can be sounded by plucking open strings with the left hand, and Library of Congress notes set the tune apart from "Cackling Hen," a different barnyard piece played in G.[2]

Charles Jacque etching of a rooster and hens in a straw-filled farmyard

Charles Jacque, Cock and Hens, etching, 1864. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The tune reached records early in the history of commercial country music. Fiddlin' Powers & Family, a Virginia family string band led by fiddler Cowan Powers, cut it for Edison on October 6, 1925 (Edison 52083).[6][7][8] In 1927 the Hill Billies, the string band fronted by Al Hopkins,[9] recorded a version issued on Vocalion 5179 and Brunswick 175.[1] The Tune Archive also lists 1928 Gennett recordings by G. B. Grayson and by Grayson & Whitter.[1] A widely repeated tale holds that Cowan Powers suffered a fatal heart attack in the early 1950s while playing "Cluck Old Hen" on stage at a Stanley Brothers show; one history of the band introduces it with "the story goes."[1][10]

Folklorists and revival players kept the tune going. Alan Jabbour recorded Virginia fiddler Henry Reed playing it in 1966 and 1967, and those recordings are now in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center.[11][12] Frank Proffitt sang it with his banjo on a 1962 Folk-Legacy album.[13] It also appears on Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley's Original Folkways Recordings: 1960–1962, released in 1994.[14] In 2020 Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei, on banjo and guzheng, released it as a medley titled "Ho Hey / Cluck Old Hen."[15] It still turns up at jams: a St. Louis old-time jam lists it among its tunes in A, and an Idaho bluegrass association's beginner jam has played it as an instrumental.[16][17]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cluck Old Hen (1)".
  2. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Cluck Old Hen" (Henry Reed Collection, transcription).
  3. Wikipedia: "Cluck Old Hen".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Far in the Mountains".
  5. University of North Texas Press: "Rainbow in the Morning".
  6. Internet Archive (National Park Service Edison collection): "Cluck old hen : Fiddlin' Powers and Family".
  7. UC Santa Barbara Library: "1925 Recordings Digitized by UCSB Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2026".
  8. Wikipedia: "Cowan Powers and his Family Band".
  9. Wikipedia: "The Hill Billies".
  10. Birthplace of Country Music: "Fiddlin' Cowan Powers and His Family String Band: Pioneers in Early Country Music".
  11. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Cluck Old Hen" (Henry Reed, November 26, 1966).
  12. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Cluck Old Hen" (Henry Reed, May 6, 1967).
  13. Smithsonian Folkways: "Cluck Old Hen" (Frank Proffitt).
  14. Wikipedia: "Original Folkways Recordings: 1960–1962".
  15. Smithsonian Folkways: "Ho Hey / Cluck Old Hen" (Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn).
  16. Music Folk (St. Louis): "Friends Of Old Time Jam Tune List".
  17. Idaho Bluegrass Association: "Cluck Old Hen info".