“Tippin’ Back the Corn” is a composition by Jordan Wankoff, a fiddle teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, whose tune spread through the old-time jam community from the early 2000s onward. The piece is played in AEAE cross-tuning — the fiddle strings raised to an open chord position — and that tuning is integral to the tune’s identity: the cross-tuned droning and parallel-interval resonance give it a modal richness that standard tuning can only approximate. Community sources describe it as “one of the great modern fiddle tunes,” and it circulates regularly in old-time camp and festival repertoire despite being of recent composition.
The title belongs to the tradition of Appalachian and Midwestern folk-tune names that evoke the small acts of farm and social life: “tipping back the corn” almost certainly refers to drinking corn liquor, and the name signals a lineage and community even though the composer is a contemporary Chicago teacher rather than an inherited mountain original.
Ken and Brad Kolodner recorded the featured version for The Swift House (2017). The Kolodners — a Baltimore-based father-and-son duo working primarily in the old-time fiddle and hammered-dulcimer tradition — perform the tune in its cross-tuned form, preserving the modal overtone quality that makes it distinctive. The recording is one of the cleaner available references for players approaching the piece from outside the Midwest jam circuit where it first spread.