“Hot Corn, Cold Corn” (also “Bring on Your Hot Corn,” “Green Corn,” and “Green Corn, Come Along Charlie”) is a traditional Southern song with both Black and white folk roots. The earliest documented print appearance is in Thomas W. Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes (1922), the African-American collector’s pioneering anthology of song and rhyme texts; Talley printed the song under the title “Bring on Your Hot Corn.”
The bluegrass identification of the song is owed largely to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, whose recording made it a staple of festival jam circles and string-band sets. A version is also sometimes credited to or associated with the Kentucky guitarist Asa Martin, an occasional accompanist of the fiddler Doc Roberts, though attribution becomes thin once the song moves past the early printed sources.
The “corn” of the title is corn whiskey — moonshine — and the lyric is a tongue-twister celebration of homemade liquor rather than a heartbreak or work song. The chorus’s call-and-response phrasing makes it a popular jam piece, and the song works comfortably as an up-tempo banjo and fiddle showpiece in G. Lead Belly recorded a closely related variant in his prison-blues repertoire, suggesting the older song family has a wider Black-American provenance than the standard bluegrass framing implies.
