Indian Ate A Woodchuck: A Song History
"Indian Ate the Woodchuck" is an old-time reel whose home the folklorist Jeff Titon placed in eastern Kentucky, although the Traditional Tune Archive also links it with Arkansas and Tennessee.[1] The title varies, with "ate" trading places with "eat" and the bird or animal turning up as a woodchuck, woodpecker, woodcock or woodhen, and the archive, citing Titon, calls it "something of a floating title," pointing to a similarly named but unrelated tune.[1] The archive files more than one melody under the name, among them the setting of the Kentucky fiddler Ed Haley, and it notes that one strain of Haley's tune is similar to the first strain of a melody Samuel Bayard collected from two fiddlers in southwestern Pennsylvania during the 1930s.[2] The sources consulted here do not say where the title itself came from.[1][2]
Cornelis Dusart, Village Fair, etching, 1685. A fiddler playing for dancers at a Dutch village fair, shown for the tune's life as a dance tune; it has no connection to the tune.
One documented source is John M. Salyer (1882–1952) of Salyersville in Magoffin County, Kentucky, whose sons recorded his fiddling at home on a disc machine in the early 1940s; Berea College's Appalachian Center issued those recordings in 1993.[1] Other Kentucky fiddlers who played it include Estill Bingham and Owen "Snake" Chapman, while the bluegrass fiddler Kenny Baker had a tune he called "Indian Killed a Woodcock," which Titon appears to regard as more distant from the Salyer and Haley versions.[1] Haley, of Ashland, was recorded at home by his son Ralph in 1946, and his performance appears on Forked Deer, a 1997 Rounder Records set of his home discs produced by John Hartford, who had set out to track down and preserve Haley's music.[2][3] The African American fiddler Frank Patterson recorded it as "Indian and the Woodchuck" for the Library of Congress around 1942, and the title appears in a list of Ozark Mountains fiddle tunes that the folklorist Vance Randolph published in 1954.[1] Transcriptions are printed in Titon's Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001) and the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011).[1]
Mark Gilston includes it in More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a 53-page book of sheet music for old-time American tunes and one of several volumes in which he gathers many of the most influential pieces from that tradition.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Indian Ate the Woodchuck (1)".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Indian Ate the Woodchuck (2)".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Forked Deer (Ed Haley album)".
- Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Cornelis Dusart, Village Fair, etching, 1685. The Cleveland Museum of Art.