Forked Deer

Forked Deer is one of the oldest American fiddle tunes with a paper trail. It is in George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels, published in Baltimore in 1839, the first printed collection of Southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one from the nineteenth century. Knauff wrote it in two four, and his version is recognizably this tune. Players have been passing it along for close to two hundred years.

The name has collected more theories than it can support. There is a Forked Deer River in west Tennessee. There is Fauquier County in northern Virginia, and Fauquier Deer wearing down into Forked Deer makes a tidy story that nobody can prove. Older sources spell it Forkadair and Forkedair, and some read that as Forked Air, an old term for a crooked tune. None of them is more than a guess. Charlie Bowman's 1928 side was probably the first recording, and the tune has been on records steadily since.

The two strains are built to contrast. The first runs high and busy, opening on a D arpeggio that climbs to the A above the staff and falls back through a bar of G. The second drops into a lower register and then refuses to move, hammering the A, C sharp and B figure over the A chord for three bars at a stretch. That stubbornness is what people remember, and it is why the second strain is easier to learn and harder to make interesting.

On a mandolin the first strain stays under the fifth fret on the top two courses and reads almost like an exercise in crossing between them. The second strain is a different hand. It opens on the open A course, works the C sharp and B above it, and in the seventh bar walks the whole way down to the A on the G course and back up an octave. The G sharp near the start of that strain is the one written accidental, a leading tone that pulls straight back to A, and it sits at the sixth fret of the D course. Take that bar slowly and the rest falls in behind it.