“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 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.
