Nail That Catfish To A Tree: A Song History
"Nail That Catfish to a Tree" is not an anonymous tune handed down over generations but one with a named author and a fairly recent birth date. The Traditional Tune Archive describes it as a modern composition from 1985 by Steve Rosen of the Volo Bogtrotters,[1] an old-time string band based in the Chicago area, in which Rosen played banjo.[2][3] In Rosen's own account, he wrote the tune while on a fishing trip in Florida, and the odd title comes from a tip he was given there for skinning a catfish, whose tough hide is hard to remove: fix the fish's head to a tree with a nail and strip the skin with pliers.[3] The tune was included on the band's first cassette.[2]
Allen & Ginter, Catfish, from the Fish from American Waters series, color lithograph trade card, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The piece is a G-major breakdown, printed in Songer's Portland Collection (1997) in AABB’ form, and the Tune Archive notes that it caught on with old-time fiddlers, especially in the Midwest, and has since become one of the genre's standard tunes.[1] It has also found a home in mountain dulcimer jams as one of the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam.[4]
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