Hear This Appalachian Mountain Man Call Turkeys...& They Came A Runnin!

This is Sam Honeycutt. I filmed him performing his famous turkey call in 1965 when I was making my first documentary for television on the Music of the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. Appalachia. Sam Honeycutt wrote a book shortly before he died called Twenty Years Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies. In his introduction he states “I claim to be a perfect hunter and fisherman for game fish; I know the best kinds of hunting outfit to use, I know the best kind of gun to use for killing game and also the best dogs to use for hunting.” Though “comfortable in their skin,” mountain folks aren’t inclined to be boastful. Hunnicutt isn’t bragging; he is expressing confidence in his competence. In a similar fashion, Sam’s buddy, famed mountain angler “Uncle” Mark Cathey, said “I’ve been accused of being the finest fisherman in the Smokies.” They were realists, not egotists, and forthrightness endears them to posterity. Hunnicutt was born on March 23, 1880 in Yancey County, North Carolina. Throughout his life sport lay at the heart of his being. As a young man he married Leah Truett and the newlyweds established a home alongside Deep Creek in today’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here they raised a large family. Precisely how Sam earned his livelihood remains a mystery. Family tradition has him operating a sawmill, managing a country store, guiding visiting sportsmen & doing subsistence farming. A central feature of Hunnicutt’s adulthood was a dream of finding uranium, gold, silver or precious stones. Another longtime pursuit was “sanging”—hunting ginseng for sale to Asia. Hunnicutt was known locally as a charmer. He was a popular fixture in Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. He exhibited extraordinary abilities as a singer, yodeler and storyteller while perfectly mimicking sounds of creatures such as bears, turkeys, and panthers. Whenever audience attention waned at Lunsford’s gathering, Sam enlivened things with his “blood-curdling bear dog calls.” From his twenties onward, Hunnicutt constantly wore high-topped boots. Bitten by “the biggest old rattler ever I seed,” he would point at the knot on his leg and say: “I can still feel the heat of them fangs.”  Sam’s final 35 years of life found him rootless with no fixed place of abode. Like others of his background, his uprooting left an unrecoverable void in his life. Driven from his beloved Deep Creek homestead, he became a vagabond, camping out or living with one of his children.  Between stays with his children, Hunnicutt wandered remote areas of the Appalachian high country, hunted, fished, camped, and dabbled in geological exploration. Had it not been for publication of Twenty Years Hunting and Fishing, Sam Hunnicutt would be just forgotten mountain sportsmen, his legacy consumed by the ravages of time. His book sets him apart. He even provides a sporting scorecard stating: “I have killed 55 bears, have helped catch over 500 ‘coons, (and) I have been at the catching of 76 foxes with fox-hounds.” Sam Hunnicutt lived life to its fullest and did so strictly according to his own dictates. His nine decades of life may not have defined him as a model of propriety. Yet one can only envy his free spirit and days without number spent amidst the remote fastnesses forming some of the Smokies most beautiful and beguiling areas. I would like to thank the sponsors who placed their advertisements on my clip. They make it possible for me to present more of these. They include: Billy Strings. Nothin fancy bluegrass. Classic bluegrass. Bluegrass country. Bluegrass near me. Live bluegrass near me. Appalachian bluegrass music. Charm city bluegrass 2023. Billy Strings doc Watson. Doc Watson. Earl Scruggs. Randy Scruggs. Mountain music. Old time music. The Morris Brothers. Charm city bluegrass. folk music in America. Bluegrass music Asheville NC. easy country songs. old country love songs. old country ballads. folk art center Asheville. Biltmore Village Asheville. Although I thanked him when I filmed him back in 1965, I want to thank him again for stepping up and performing for my camera. David Hoffman filmmaker