“Hell Among the Yearlings,” also written “Hell Amongst the Yearlings,” is a fiddle breakdown that has been found in places as far apart as West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska. It is most often written in D, though settings in G and C are known. The title was evidently memorable, because rural fiddlers gave it to several unrelated tunes as well. Texas fiddler Eck Robertson’s “Hell Among the Yearlings” is a different piece, a relative of “Cattle in the Cane.” Yearlings are young cattle, and one reading of the name is simply rambunctious stock. Another takes “hell” in its old sense of thick underbrush, with the yearlings lost in it. A story from Illinois is more specific. In 1916 Edgar Lee Masters, the author of Spoon River, and Theodore Dreiser visited the fiddler John Armstrong at Oakford, and Armstrong told them he could not recall the tune’s first name. During a dance at Ben Sutton’s place, he said, the cattle broke into the corn, and it had been “Hell Amongst the Yearlings” ever since. Masters published the account in Esquire in 1939, more than twenty years later.
The title turns up in reports of the DeKalb County, Alabama, fiddlers’ convention between 1926 and 1931. The first commercial recording came from Clark Kessinger of Kanawha County, West Virginia. On 10 February 1928 in Ashland, Kentucky, he recorded it as one of the Kessinger Brothers, with Luches Kessinger on guitar, and Brunswick issued it on Brunswick 235, backed with “Turkey in the Straw.” On it Kessinger brushes the strings with his forefinger for a pizzicato effect that other fiddlers copied. Alan Jabbour judged that most modern versions stem from this record, and that its extra beats in the high part, which he heard as the Appalachian habit of dwelling on a note mid-phrase, became standard in many old-time and bluegrass versions. A few Appalachian fiddlers, among them Henry Reed and Doc White, played it in square, regular strains.
Other recordings followed. John Dilleshaw’s north Georgia band, Dilly and His Dill Pickles, recorded it for Vocalion in 1930. Herbert Halpert recorded it for the Library of Congress in 1939 from the Mississippi fiddler Frank Kittrell, and Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers in the early 1940s. Kessinger recorded it again in 1964 at radio station WRDS in Roscommon, Michigan, for his LP The Legend of Clark Kessinger, later reissued by Folkways and County. At the National Old Time Fiddlers Contest in Weiser, Idaho, on 22 June 1963, Byron Berline played it for the contest album. It is on Charlie Walden’s list of a hundred essential Missouri fiddle tunes.
