“Cluck Old Hen” is a traditional Appalachian fiddle tune and one of the most played minor-key pieces in the old-time and early bluegrass repertoire. The title refers to a hen that has stopped laying — a poultry-farming fixture in the Appalachian household — and the dry humor of the name suits the tune’s droning, hypnotic character. The A-minor modal setting separates it from the bright-keyed breakdowns that dominate the jam-session call list and gives fiddle players a context for double-stop voicings rarely needed in major-key material.
No single source fiddler is credited with the canonical version; the tune appears in collections going back to the 19th century and carries a large family of regional variants. The alternation between Am and its minor-key neighbors makes it a natural vehicle for cross-tuned fiddle and gives dobro players an opportunity for the darker modal voicing that standard-key bluegrass seldom requires.
Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded it for Every Time You Say Goodbye (Rounder, 1992), one of the band’s early Rounder LPs and the recording that brought “Cluck Old Hen” to a wide contemporary-bluegrass audience. Krauss’s fiddle treatment takes the tune at a bright tempo without sacrificing the minor-key weight, and the track has become one of the standard reference recordings for pickers learning the piece for the first time.
