“Walk Chalk Chicken” comes from the playing of Melvin Wine, of Braxton County, West Virginia:

But I’m pretty sure I first heard it played by Karen Celia Heil on Jason and Pharis Romero’s “Back Up and Push” album:

Listening to it again now, though, I hear her consistently doing something a little different in one of the phrases, so now I’m not sure where exactly I learned this. It’s one of my favorite tunes to play online with banjo player Paul Meredith, who I’ve been jamming with weekly for years now (a recording of the two of us is the audio file attached to this post), so it’s possible I did learn it from Heil first and it has slipped over time into how I play it now.

Where does the title come from? Andrew Kuntz at the Traditional Tune Archive says there’s speculation that the “Walk Chalk” part could come from a minstrel song or rhyme written in dialect, but that there’s no evidence for it. I’m not sure Melvin Wine included the “necktie” part — on the “Vintage Wine” tape he just announces it as “Walk Talk Chicken”, anyway.  I did find a reference at Mudcat Cafe from 2005 attributing the full title to him, but that was two years after he died, so I don’t know.

This is a crooked tune, but once you’ve played it a few times, I think it starts feeling pretty natural. It’s also best played in cross-tuning, AEae.

If you know anything about how it got its title, please leave a comment or drop me a line! (You can reach me at it@wotfa.org.) In the meantime, I’m just going to imagine one of my chickens strutting around wearing a tie.