“Indian Ate the Woodchuck” is an old-time breakdown that the folklorist Jeff Todd Titon, in his 2001 collection Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, places in eastern Kentucky. Its title has never held still. Fiddlers have said “ate” or “eat,” and the unlucky creature has been a woodchuck, a woodpecker, a woodcock or a woodhen. Titon treats it as something of a floating title, since a Kentucky tune called “Indian and the Woodhen” is a different melody altogether.
Several Kentucky fiddlers kept it in their repertoires. John Salyer (1882–1952) of Salyersville, in Magoffin County, played a two-part version. It survives on home recordings he made in 1941 and 1942, which Berea College’s Appalachian Center issued in 1993. Estill Bingham (1899–1990) and Owen “Snake” Chapman also played it. The blind fiddler Ed Haley, who lived in Ashland and died there in 1951, played a busier, more heavily noted version, which Titon transcribed in three strains. Haley seldom recorded commercially. Late in life he made discs at home for his family on a Wilcox-Gay disc-cutting machine, and Rounder issued part of that material in 1997 as Forked Deer, including this tune.
The melody travelled beyond Kentucky. Around 1942 the African-American fiddler Frank Patterson recorded it for the Library of Congress as “Indian and the Woodchuck.” The title also appears in a list of traditional Ozark fiddle tunes that the folklorist Vance Randolph published in 1954. The bluegrass fiddler Kenny Baker knew it as “Indian Killed a Woodcock.” His tune is close to one that J. P. Fraley of Rush, Kentucky, plays under the name “Sail Away Ladies.” Fraley got that tune from Haley, who called it by the “Indian” title. Titon, however, regards the Baker and Fraley tune as some distance from the versions of Haley and Salyer. Nor is there one settled key: the tune is indexed in C major, while a published transcription of the revival fiddler Bruce Molsky’s playing is in D.
