“Groundhog” is a traditional Appalachian song and banjo tune, a comic hunting number long popular across the mountain country of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Like most old-time pieces it has no known author and was carried for generations by ear before it ever reached a recording studio.
The song was a clear favorite of early collectors and musicians: the Library of Congress documented more than a dozen versions before 1940, and string bands cut it for commercial labels in the 1920s. Its lyric follows a rough, good-humored groundhog hunt, the singer cheerfully promising to skin the animal and tan its hide — the kind of broad, rural comedy common to old-time party songs.
Bright and easy to play, “Groundhog” became a clawhammer-banjo standard and passed readily into the bluegrass repertoire. The version heard here is by the Dillards, the influential Missouri band, from their 1963 debut album “Back Porch Bluegrass.”
