“Greasy Coat” is a West Virginia fiddle tune in A Dorian, carried primarily through the Hammons family of Webster County and Pocahontas County. Edden Hammons (1876–1955) is the central figure: his recordings made by folklorist Louis Chappell in August 1947 preserve his version as “Old Greasy Coat” and are among the most important documents of the Webster County fiddle tradition. His nephew Burl Hammons (1908–1993) continued the tradition; the Rounder LP Shaking Down the Acorns (1973) made the Hammons family’s West Virginia playing widely available for the first time, and the compilation The Hammons Family (Rounder, 1998) remains the definitive anthology.
The title has prompted several folk explanations — an old euphemism, an unwashed lanolin-rich fleece, a Confederate soldier’s worn coat — and a loose verse sometimes sung with the tune (“Well I don’t drink and I don’t smoke / And I don’t mess with the greasy coat”) is too cryptic to settle any of them. The AEae cross-tuning Edden Hammons used creates a modal drone richness — the neutral third degree hovering between C and C♯ — that standard tuning approximates but doesn’t fully replicate.
George Jackson and Tristan Scroggins recorded it for The Old Time 100 Vol. 1 (2024), a project documenting the canonical old-time instrumental repertoire for contemporary players. Jackson (New Zealand-born, Nashville-based) and Scroggins bring a clean, technically polished approach to a tune whose original character was shaped by one of the most distinctive regional voices in the American fiddle tradition.
