The Monroe Brothers
Have a Feast Here Tonight
Single: Have a Feast Here Tonight (1936) Bluegrass Discography
Musicians
“Rabbit in the Log” (also “Feast Here Tonight”) is a traditional Southern banjo and fiddle song with both Black and white roots, widely played in old-time and bluegrass repertoires through the 20th century. The lyric tracks a hunter’s encounter with a rabbit holed up in a log and the prospect of a fine supper if he can flush it out — a comic celebration of subsistence hunting in the older country tradition.
The song’s earliest commercial recordings are from the 1920s old-time-music era; the Monroe Brothers cut a version in the 1930s as “Feast Here Tonight,” and Bill Monroe carried it into his Blue Grass Boys repertoire. Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys’ 1964 reading — the version associated with this entry — brought the song into the bluegrass-traditional jam-tune canon with Jesse McReynolds’s signature crosspicked mandolin break.
The harmonic shape is straightforwardly traditional and three-chord, the tempo sits in the brisk-up range, and the song’s call-and-response chorus structure makes it a comfortable jam piece. It remains a regular early call at festival jams that lean toward the older country and bluegrass jam-tune repertoire.
