Hell Among the Yearlings

Hell Among the Yearlings is a traditional American old-time breakdown of the Upper South most commonly played in D major, though G major and C major versions also appear in regional collections. Its defining feature in the most widely played version is a crooked first strain of nine measures instead of the usual eight, an irregularity preserved in most bluegrass and contest-fiddling renditions, though Henry Reed’s version (collected by Alan Jabbour for the Library of Congress in 1967) keeps a regular bar count. The title is a “floater” attached to several distinct, unrelated tunes across different regions, including separate versions documented among Arkansas fiddlers and a Texas variant tied to “Cattle in the Cane.” The tune’s most historically influential recording was made by Kanawha County, West Virginia fiddler Clark Kessinger in 1928 for Brunswick (#235, backed with “Turkey in the Straw”), the first commercial recording of the piece. Arthur Smith later recorded a version issued on the Folkways LP Look! Who’s Here: Old Timers of the Grand Ole Opry (1964).