Little Rabbit: A Song History
Most "Little Rabbit" versions heard today descend from a 1931 record by Crockett's Kentucky Mountaineers, made in New York for the Crown label.[1] The band was a family affair: its patriarch, "Dad" Crockett, came originally from West Virginia and settled in Bath, Kentucky, as a young man, and fiddler Kenny Hall recalled that the family moved on to Hollywood in the 1920s; they were California residents by the time of the session.[1] Their record is really two tunes joined together, with "Little Rabbit" filling the first three strains and "Rabbit Where's Your Mammy?" the last two.[1] Players often sing a short verse about a rabbit and its mother over that final section.[1]
Henri Charles Guérard, The Rabbits, woodcut, 1893. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The melody belongs to a large family that the Traditional Tune Archive thinks probably began in the Blue Ridge before spreading widely.[1][2] The Archive files "Little Rabbit" as another name for "John Brown's Dream," and it cross-references both titles with "Pretty Little Miss."[1][2] Tommy Jarrell suggested that a tune of that name was the source of the "John Brown's Dream" he learned from his father.[2] A G-major "Big Eyed Rabbit" from William Marshall of Carroll County, Virginia, is counted in the same group.[3] The tune also traveled west: Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner played it in A, and a version was noted from W. S. Collins of Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma; printed collections give it in either A or D.[1] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II includes "Little Rabbit" alongside "John Brown's Dream" and "Big-Eyed Rabbit."[4]
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