“Forked Deer” is an old-time breakdown known across the Upper South, usually played in D. Its earliest known appearance in print appears to be in George P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels (volume 1, Baltimore, c. 1839). R. P. Christeson noted a considerable resemblance to a Scottish tune, “Rachel Rae.” The tune is named in an 1845 dialect story set in eastern Tennessee, and it was recalled as played before the Civil War by a slave fiddler, Jim Pritchett, in Marengo County, Alabama. It was on 1915 tune lists at Berea, Kentucky, and was played at the Berea fiddle contests of 1919 and 1920.
The title has been explained in several ways. William Byrne proposed that “Forked” is a corruption of “Fauquier,” a county in northern Virginia; others connect it with the Forked Deer River in Tennessee; and John Hartford and Pat Sky speculated that it began as “Forked Air,” meaning a crooked melody. Versions titled “Forkadair” and “Forkedair Jig” are on record, the latter a title Gerry Milnes says was used in a minstrel-era version. Vance Randolph wrote that in the Ozarks the title was regarded as vulgar, because “forked” was a local word for sexually excited; the fiddler Lon Jordan called the tune “Forked-Horn Deer” when ladies were present, and a radio announcer at KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, introduced it as “Frisky Deer” on 3 May 1947.
Most modern versions have two parts, but many older ones have more, and Jeff Titon suggests that the recording industry did much to shorten and standardize it. Wilson Douglas and his teacher French Carpenter, of Clay County, West Virginia, played three parts. Ed Haley (1883–1951), Charlie Bowman and J. W. Day played five, and the itinerant fiddler John Johnson, who learned it from an Arthur Smith record, played six.
Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland cut it in June 1922 at the first recording session of American fiddle music, for Victor, though that side was not issued. Taylor’s Kentucky Boys recorded it for Gennett in 1927, Charlie Bowman for Columbia in 1929, and H. L. Maxey of Franklin County, Virginia, played it as “Forky Deer” for the Library of Congress in 1939. John Salyer is heard playing it on his 1941 home recordings.
