Cluck Old Hen

Cluck Old Hen is mountain minor, the sound old-time players mean when they say a tune is in one of the crooked keys. A C natural sits over an A tonic, and the tune never settles into major or into a proper minor either. That refusal is the tune. It is a song as well, about the good old hen that lays eggs for the railroad men, and every singer carries a different set of verses.

On fiddle it is a cross tuning showpiece. Tuned AEae, the fiddle has drones sitting under everything, and the low strain's two long notes started life as double stops. The page prints the melody note of each, because that is what one mandolin can play, so it is a fair transcription of the tune and not of the fiddle sound. Some players sharpen the C in the cadence under the E chord. The plain C natural is the majority reading and the one printed here.

The form is short. Two four bar strains instead of the usual eight put it in the same family as Cripple Creek, and the tune comes around fast. That is part of why it holds up in a jam. The turns arrive quickly enough that people start varying it, and the variations are where the tune lives.

On a mandolin the high strain is the cackle, a rock between the open E and the A at the fifth fret, answered by g-a-g on the E string. The low strain drops onto the A course and leans on its two long notes, the C at the third fret of the A string and the G below it at the fifth fret of the D string. The whole tune is about six notes, and all of the flavor is in where that C sits. Play it plain and let it stay unresolved.