“Ride the Wild Turkey” was composed by Darol Anger in 1978 and recorded for his debut album Fiddlistics (Kaleidoscope Records, 1978) — the second release on the label that had introduced the David Grisman Quintet two years earlier. Anger was a core member of that DGQ circle, and Fiddlistics placed his fiddle voice at the center of a recording for the first time, with Tony Rice on guitar and Todd Phillips on bass. The title’s sense of controlled, slightly chaotic propulsion suits the A-major melody: there is something deliberately unruly in the rhythm, a quality that makes the tune feel faster than its tempo and harder to domesticate than its form suggests.
Jerry Douglas recorded it for Slide Rule (Union Station Records, 1992), bringing the piece into the post-Grisman world that Anger and Rice had helped create. The dobro’s sustain and slide vocabulary gave the melody a different textural quality than Anger’s fiddle original, and Douglas later recorded it again with Alison Krauss, extending the tune’s reach into the contemporary bluegrass mainstream.
The composition belongs to the early-dawg-era catalog of tunes that circulate between the bluegrass, newgrass, and progressive acoustic worlds — a small but durable repertoire where players from multiple traditions can find common ground. Anger’s later work with the Turtle Island String Quartet and various newgrass collaborations continued the cross-genre fluency this piece embodies.
