“Indian Ate the Woodchuck” is a traditional old-time fiddle tune from eastern Kentucky. Its principal source is the blind fiddler Ed Haley, whose playing was preserved on home recordings, and it also turns up in the repertoires of other Kentucky fiddlers. The tune carries a long list of variant titles, with the words shifting from “ate” to “eat” and the animal changing from a woodchuck to a woodpecker or woodcock.
The piece is a three-part tune in the key of D, classed among the reels of the old-time repertoire. Its tangle of titles is itself a window into how this music traveled — learned by ear, renamed, and reshaped from one fiddler to the next.
This recording features Chance McCoy and the Appalachian String Band, performing the tune in the old-time string-band tradition from which it comes.