Two different old-time fiddle tunes go by the name “Chinquapin Hunting,” one usually played in A and the other in D. The A tune, in three parts, comes from the playing of Norman Edmonds (1889–1976) of Hillsville, Virginia, near Galax. Fiddlers play it cross-tuned, A-E-A-E, and old-time players file it among the crooked tunes. It is not related to the D-major “Chinquapin Hunting” that the Kentucky fiddler Hiram Stamper passed to his son Art.
Edmonds led a band he called the Old Timers, with Rufus Quesinberry on banjo and his sons John, Cecil and Paul on guitars. From the mid-1950s until about 1970 another son, Rush, taped their fifteen-minute programs for Saturday-morning radio in Galax, and “Chinquapin Hunting” is among the pieces on those tapes, which the Field Recorders’ Collective issued in 2015. In 1973 Edmonds recorded it again, with Rufus Burnett on banjo, as the closing track of his Davis Unlimited LP Train on the Island (DU 33002). His is the version most often heard at jams and festivals today, although over the years its B and C parts have drifted slightly from the way he played them.
The chinquapin, or chinkapin, is a dwarf chestnut, Castanea pumila, a small, shrubby tree whose name comes from an eastern Algonquian language. Its nuts ripen in the fall, and in the southern mountains they were gathered in quantity to eat, to sell and to feed livestock. Chestnut blight, a fungus brought in on imported trees in the late 1800s, cut the chinquapin back along with most of the native chestnut family. Other tunes take their names from the nut too, among them Clark Kessinger’s “Chinky Pin,” recorded for Brunswick in 1929, and Hobart Smith’s banjo piece “Chinquapin Pie.”
