Shaking Down The Acorns: A Song History

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"Shaking Down the Acorns" is closely tied to Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and the fiddling of the Hammons family. Burl Hammons played it in ADae cross-tuning and credited it to his uncle Nige Cogar, a neighbor of the family during Burl's boyhood.[1] On recordings made by the folklorists Alan Jabbour and Carl Fleischhauer, Burl follows the tune with a family story about Nige's brother riding a deer down a snowy hillside.[2] The tune also gave its name to a 1973 Rounder LP of music and stories from Pocahontas and Greenbrier Counties, featuring Burl, other Hammons family members and fiddler Mose Coffman.[3] In his notes to that album, Fleischhauer described it as a "circular" tune, each strain flowing into the next instead of resolving on the tonic, a type he found frequent in British tradition but uncommon in American.[1]

Botanical watercolor of English oak sprigs with leaves and acorns above a cut section of oak trunk

Ludwig Pfleger, Studies of the blossoms, fruits and trunk of an English oak (Quercus robur), 1788. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Edden Hammons, another of Burl's uncles, called it "Shaking Off the Acorns" and used the same ADae tuning.[1] Folklorist Louis Watson Chappell recorded Edden in August 1947 on a handmade disc recorder, the only known recordings of him, and West Virginia University Press issued them in 1999 as The Edden Hammons Collection, with this tune on the first volume.[4][5] The Traditional Tune Archive classes the melody as A Mixolydian.[1] Peghead Nation points out that it sits in A even though its tuning is usually associated with tunes in D, and that its first part is a four-bar phrase heard three times.[6]

The tune has since traveled beyond the family. A 1974 fiddle-contest recording from the Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music collection has Walt Koken playing it in standard tuning.[7] It appears in Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994) and on Rauland Rambles (2016) by Ånon Egeland, Arto Järvelä and Bruce Molsky.[1] Peghead Nation teaches it in its old-time fiddle course.[6] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II includes two arrangements, "Shaking Down the Acorns I" and "II."[8]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Shaking down the Acorns (2)".
  2. Southern Cultures: "The Hammons Family: The Traditions of a West Virginia Family and Their Friends (Review)".
  3. WorldCat: "Shaking down the acorns: traditional music and stories from Pocahontas and Greenbrier Counties, West Virginia".
  4. Penn Libraries: "The Edden Hammons collection".
  5. Slippery Hill: "Shaking Off The Acorns" (Edden Hammons).
  6. Peghead Nation: "Shaking Off the Acorns, Part 1".
  7. Slippery Hill: "Shaking Down The Acorns" (Walt Koken).
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".