Life has been busy, and I’m a week late getting a tune of the month posted. Sorry! I will have sheet music posted for this soon, but I wanted to get what I have now out there, before it’s any later.

Indian Ate a Woodchuck has been my aspirational tune for the last few years. Every once in a while I would try to learn it again, to see what my progress as a fiddler had been like since the last time I tried. The day I could actually play the tune all the way through and I felt like it was recognizably the same tune felt amazing. I still don’t have it fully internalized: please ignore my bowing in the videos, because if I try to think about what I’m doing, I mess up. Now that I can play the notes, I’m going to have to spend some quality time watching Grace Forrest play it on YouTube, slowed to maybe 50% speed, so I can see what she’s doing with her bow. I think she’s playing a whole bunch of emphasis on one long up-stroke at the end of a phrase, for example, and I can’t figure out quite how to make my bow do that. So it’s still a good learning tune for me.

I don’t know if this is the same for everyone, but I feel like I learn best when I’m failing just a little: when there’s a tune I can’t quite play, or when I’m playing with people who are just a bit better than I am. YouTube has been a great resource for this, since there are so many amazing players captured at jams there. Grace Forrest’s video of this tune is one of my favorite videos, and was for years one that I was sure I would never even be able to come close playing along with. But it turns out that what music teachers say is true: if you keep practicing, even if you can’t hear any difference from day to day, it’s making a difference.

This tune comes from Ed Haley (1885–1951), of West Virginia. You can listen to him playing it at Slippery Hill, and I don’t think he plays it quite the same way twice, which is pretty typical of him. Inventiveness in variations is a hallmark of his playing. Haley is high on my list of fiddlers I would visit if I had a time machine.

I’ve recorded a half-speed version of this tune as well: