Cricket On The Hearth: A Song History
"Cricket on the Hearth" is a D-major breakdown in two strains, tied in the Traditional Tune Archive to the Ozarks and to east Tennessee. It is also listed under the title "Cricket on a Hearth."[1][2] Ozarks folklorist Vance Randolph included the title in a 1954 published list of the region's traditional fiddle tunes. In east Tennessee, fiddler Charlie Acuff (born 1919) learned it from his grandfather, Charlie Boyd Acuff.[1] The tune belongs to a large family of related melodies that includes "Rocky Mountain Goat," "Drunken Billy Goat" and "Marmaduke's Hornpipe," and its second strain is built much like the second part of "Hell Amongst the Yearlings."[1]
Adolph von Menzel, Woman Reading at the Fireside, lithograph, 1851. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Kenny Baker put it on his County album Portrait of a Bluegrass Fiddler (1968); the Traditional Tune Archive says his source was fiddler Art Wooten, whom Baker heard over the radio in the late 1940s.[1][2] The tune also appears on Baker's 1993 County release Master Fiddler.[3] Other recordings include the Smokey Valley Boys' Music of North Carolina (1978) and John McCutcheon's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (June Appal, 1977).[1] The tune was printed in David Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983).[1][2]
The name was in circulation well before the fiddle recordings. In 1873, Lee & Walker of Philadelphia published "Cricket on the Hearth," a piano polka-mazurka by Frank Green.[4] That piece is a different kind of dance from the breakdown, and nothing in the sources consulted here connects the two. "Cricket on the Hearth" is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]
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