“The Squirrel Hunters” is an American tune collected in southwestern Pennsylvania, where it was known chiefly as a fife “stop-beat” piece. The folklorist Samuel Bayard printed versions from nine southwestern Pennsylvania fifers and fiddlers in Dance to the Fiddle (1981). The Fiddler’s Companion lists other names it went by there, including “Squirrel Hunting,” “The Bell Cow,” “Dilly’s Favorite,” “Old Common Time” and “The Pennsylvania Quickstep.”
Bayard placed the tune in what he called “one of the most widespread and ramifying of our British Isles melodic families,” a very old group of tunes that turns up in many modes and in 2/4, 4/4, 6/8 and 3/4 time. He gave the family the name “Welcome Home,” after one of its Irish airs, and listed other old-country members: “The Oyster Wife’s Rant,” “The Haughs of Cromdale,” “Wate You How the Play Began,” “The Hillside,” and “(Fare Thee Well) Sweet Killaloe.” He admitted that the name was an arbitrary choice.
John Hartford opened his 1996 Rounder album Wild Hog in the Red Brush with it, crediting the tune to Bayard. The band Special Consensus included it on Rivers and Roads (Compass, 2018), in an arrangement credited to Alison Brown and the band.
