Shaking Down the Acorns

Burl Hammons, a grandson of Edden’s father, Jesse Hammons, also played it, and said that his tune came from his uncle Nige Cogar, who lived near the Hammons family when Burl was young. Both men played it in ADae tuning, a tuning more often used for tunes in D, though the tune itself is in A. In notes to a Rounder LP, Carl Fleischhauer described it as one of the dance tunes, often found in British tradition but rarely in America, that are called “circular” because they do not stop on the tonic at the end of each strain but move straight into the next.

A different tune with the same title, in D mixolydian, circulates among fiddlers through Wilson Douglas and Bruce Molsky.