Lost Indian

The name refers to a whoop. Fiddlers would sometimes yelp or whoop to represent an Indian lost in the wilderness, and in Ed Haley’s Kentucky version the melody and rhythm were themselves said to represent an Indian “squalling in the wilderness.” The Missouri fiddler Bob Holt told Mark Wilson that when Uncle John Wills (father of Bob Wills) played the tune on the radio and let out the yelp, it “just about curled your hair.” A tune with this title was mentioned in a 1931 account of a fiddlers’ contest in LaFollette, Tennessee, as commonly played, though which of the many tunes by that name was meant is unknown; the title is also in Vance Randolph’s 1954 list of Ozark fiddle tunes.

Other tunes of the same name have no obvious link to these. A Surry County, North Carolina, melody in D, recorded by Kenny Baker among others, resembles “Cherokee Shuffle,” and R.P. Christeson printed an unrelated Nebraska tune in C from Zeke Holdren.