Squirrel Hunters

The tune came into the old-time jams from a book. Samuel Bayard, a folklorist at Penn State, spent decades collecting from fiddlers and fifers in southwestern Pennsylvania, near the Ohio and West Virginia lines, and printed nine versions of Squirrel Hunters in Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife in 1981. In Pennsylvania it was mostly a fife tune, a march in 2/4. John Hartford found it there and recorded it in 1996 on Wild Hog in the Red Brush, an album of fiddle tunes few people were playing, and it has been a jam tune ever since.

The name is usually tied to the Squirrel Hunters of 1862, the thousands of Ohio farmers who turned out with their own rifles when a Confederate army threatened Cincinnati that September. The tune may be named for them or it may be older, and nobody has shown which. Bayard thought the melody belonged to a very large family of British and Irish tunes with no clear beginning, and West Virginia fiddlers played a relative of it as Dan Friend's Piece and as Rainy Day.

The key confuses people. It uses the notes of D major but lands on A, so every G is natural and the sound is A mixolydian. Some players chord the low strain around E minor, since it starts on the E, and Hartford did. Most jams play A and G under both strains, and that is what this page marks.

On a mandolin the low strain starts on the open E course and works down to the G at the fifth fret of the D course, and the high strain climbs to the a and reaches once for the b at the seventh fret. This setting fills the long notes in the fourth bar of each strain with a figure that drops to the open A course between melody notes, which is easier than it looks and is where the tune gets its bounce. Each strain ends with G to A on the D and A courses, a stand-in for the slide a fiddler would play.