Smoky Mountain Blackbird; Crow Fly; or, Black Palmer

This dressing of the Smoky Mountain Blackbird is unweighted and uses the 2x dry fly hook in size 14 that other flies in this blog use. Also, following an almost identical dressing by Roger Lowe, the Crow Fly, it uses a starling primary for the palmer.

Hook:		4-10
Thread:		Black
Tail:		Starling primary barbules, tied the length of the hook shank
Body:		Peacock herl
Hackle:		Split starling primary
		L. J. DeCuir includes the Smoky Mountain Blackbird in his Southeastern Flies (2001), noting the similarities between it and the better known Yallerhammer—it uses a peacock herl body and “utilizes the split wing feather of a bird.” DeCuir gives this dressing for the fly: “Hook: Mustad 9672, TMC 5263 or 3x or 4x Streamer Hook #4-10 Thread: Black Weight: ‘Lead’ wire [or lead substitute] Tail: Barbules from the wing feather of a blackbird Palmered Rib: Split wing feather of a blackbird Body: Peacock herl” While the Smoky Mountain Blackbird most resembles DeCuir’s tailless dressing of the Yallerhammer, “it can also be fished like a Woolly Bugger,” even though, as DeCuir notes, it is “usually fished in the mountains of the Southeast like most heavily weighted nymphs.” The “blackbird” of DeCuir’s Smoky Mountain Blackbird does not specify a species like the distinctive Yallerhammer, despite their similarities, and there are nearly thirty species of blackbird in the Americas. Roger Lowe gives an almost identical dressing in his Fly Pattern Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains (2001), which he calls Crow Fly. He notes that it is “tied similar to the Yellow Hammer but with a Crow feather; imitates the molting stonefly.” “Hook: 9671 Mustad Thread: Black Body: Black yarn or peacock herl Hackle: Biot quill from Crow or Starling”

Similar tailless dressings exist, most often listed as a Black Palmer. John Turton’s includes a Black Palmer Fly in his Angler’s Manual (1836) for fishing in the latter part of the season, from “July to September.” He dresses it “with dark orange silk; wing, black hen’s hackle feather; body, copper-coloured peacock’s feather; after rains, ribbed with silver twist.” Roger Woolley includes a Black Palmer in a later edition of Modern Trout Flies (1950) that does not list a thread color, as is usually the case with the flies on Woolley’s list, but includes the materials for dressing Turton’s “after rains” Black Palmer Fly, with a rib of silver wire rather than silver twist. It could easily be dressed with the dark orange thread Turton gives. The name Black Palmer covers a variety of dressings, the black referring either to the hackle, as in Turton’s dressing, or the body, like the Black Palmers of Alfred Ronalds’ and Charles Bowlker’s. Both Ronald’s and Bowlker’s dressings, in The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology (1836) and The Art of Angling (1774) respectively, utilize a black ostrich body, silver twist, and either a black or red cock’s hackle palmer. John Jackson’s Practical Fly Fisher (1853) includes a dressing for the black palmer that is much more variable (and includes a variation that is very similar to the Yallerhammer): “Body.—Dark Peacock’s, or Ostrich’s herl, ribbed with gold tinsel and green silk. Black, brown, or dark red Cock’s hackle over all.”

Red Ass; or, the Arkansas Red Butt

Hook:		10-16
Thread:		Red
Tip:		Silk buttonhole twist - Coats & Clark's 184, red, size D
Body:		Peacock herl
Hackle:		Partridge
		L. J. DeCuir lists the Red Ass as the Arkansas Red Butt in his Southeastern Flies (2000), noting that “peacock herl flies have always been good producers on the mountain streams of the Southeast and this one is no exception. This pattern is from Jerry Cobb. He’s had great success with it on the streams in the higher elevations in the Smokies as well as the Northern Arkansas trout streams.” DeCuir dressed it as a heavily hackled wet fly: “Hook: Mustad 3906, TMC 3976 #8-16 Thread: Red Tag: Red thread Body: Peacock herl Hackle: Partridge tied as a wet fly collar Head: Red thread built up fairly heavily” DeCuir points out that the Arkansas Red Butt works equally well on trout in Southern Appalachian mountains or the tailraces of east Tennessee as it does on panfish and bass in farm ponds and warm water impoundments. Cobb’s combination of peacock herl, red thread, and a black and white barred hackling recalls dressings like the Gray Hackle Peacock and its precedents; dressed without a tip, the fly bears a strong resemblance to Sylvester Neme's Syl's Nymph.

Pat's Nymph

This dressing excludes the lead wire that Pat Proffitt recommends, and uses a size 14 dry fly hook rather than the down eye, 2X long, 2X heavy hook with a perfect bend Pat Proffitt assigns. This dresses uses a lightly-variegated, smoky dun grizzly hackle and a brown furnace hen hackle.

Hook:		6-16
Thread:		Black
Tail:		Brown and grizzly hackle fibers
Body:		Muskrat dubbing
Hackle:		Soft brown and grizzly hackle
		Although the fly is billed as a nymphal pattern, the basic, tied-in-the-round design of the Pat’s Nymph is essentially a tailed soft hackle dressing. L. J. DeCuir includes this fly in Southeastern Flies (2000) with two others developed by Pat Proffitt, “a legendary fly fisherman of East Tennessee,” classing the set of three as “mountain flies—simple by highly effective.” DeCuir notes two variations for dressing the Pat's Nymph: a copper wire rib for the full length of the body and/or partridge substituted for poultry hackle. He points out, as well, that local, East Tennessee tiers often simplify the dressing by leaving out the grizzly hackle, using instead only brown hackle for the tail and collar.  In a chapter of Masters on the Nymph (1979), "Advanced Nymphing Techniques," Chuck Fothergill describes a Muskrat Nymph that is dressed much like the fly many anglers in East Tennessee also refer to as Pat's Nymph. Fothergill dressed his Muskrat with brown hackle for the tailing and hackle, with lighter tying thread. He notes that "this simple pattern of brown and gray has proven itself for years on countless rivers and lakes."

Yaller Hammer; Yallerhammer; or Yellow Hammer

The origins of the Yallerhammer are so obscure they will likely never be known, yet few flies exemplify the heritage of Southern angling more. The Southern angler will insist that the Yallerhammer sprang from the rustic fly boxes of Appalachia sui generis or, as the argument usually goes, that it developed in a geographical vacuum, cut off from a larger angling culture. Armed only with conjecture and pride, Southern anglers have declared the singularity of the Yallerhammer so long that it has become more than a fly in the vise. It's a proof, the faint, lingering trace of the longstanding tradition of Southern fly dressing. And it's all there can be - where the written record is lacking, memory must suffice. "Art is no part of southern life," William Faulkner asserted: "We need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage." Thus the annals of Southern Appalachian fly fishing are in the mouths of its anglers or on the ends of their lines. And, thus, the Yallerhammer. The art of any author is lasting. A book of fly dressings as old as the fifteenth century or the nineteenth-century manuscript record of a gentleman's angling club endures intact. But the art of the fly tier must always have dissolution as its goal. If they are well-tied and serve their purpose, the best flies will ravel eventually in a trout's jaw.  It is unlikely that the angler who first lashed a yallerhammer’s primary to the shank of a hook and wound it to the eye died proudly for having left behind an icon of Southern fly tying. It was probably a simpler satisfaction - in having substituted the hackles of a mountain woodpecker for the shorebird hackles of the golden plover, that fly tier had brought the memory of a dressing from the North Country to North America and made it Southern Appalachia's own. "It's fine to think that you will leave something behind you when you die," Faulkner noted, "but it's better to have made something you can die with." It's the right sort of pride for a Southern angler and a very pleasant conjecture on the whole. Dressed as a palmer, the Yallerhammer is not without precedent—perhaps the Scots-Irish settlers of these mountains applied the hackles from local game birds to their fly dressing traditions. In his Practical Fly-Fisher (1854), John Jackson recommended flies with dark bodies accented by a palmered, dingy-yellowish hackle: one is "A good Palmer for Spring," tied with a "body, green herl of Peacock, gold tinsel, green silk, with a greenish stained or grizzled Cock’s hackle over all." Such "greenish stained" hackle would likely take on a deep-yellow cast in a swift run. Jackson also notes that another “good general fly is a mottled hackle, from a Hen Grouse’s neck, wrapped in a body of brown Peacock’s herl and yellow silk," but its variant is more like the modern Yallerhammer: "N. B. Our local Anglers use a Golden Plover’s Hackle, and Tom Tit’s tail for the same purpose." Jackson's North Country contemporaries clearly had no qualms about substituting hackles - our Southern Highlanders were likely as quick to substitute the dingy-yellow primaries of their local yallerhammer for the dark ash-and-yellow hackles of the ocean-distant golden plover. The tradition of Southern fly fishing, however old it may be, has been best documented recently, in books that include Don Howell and his son Kevin’s Tying and Fishing Southern Appalachian Trout Flies (1999), L. J. DeCuir’s Southeastern   Flies (1999), and Roger Lowe’s Fly Pattern Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains (2001). For all of these anglers, the Yaller Hammer, Yallarhammer Nymph, or Yellow Hammer, respectively, is a palmered nymph dressed on a standard nymph hook: a down eye, 2X long, 2X heavy hook with a perfect bend.

The origins of the Yallerhammer are so obscure they will likely never be known, yet few flies exemplify the heritage of Southern angling more. The Southern angler will insist that the Yallerhammer sprang from the rustic fly boxes of Appalachia sui generis or, as the argument usually goes, that it developed in a geographical vacuum, cut off from a larger angling culture. Armed only with conjecture and pride, Southern anglers have declared the singularity of the Yallerhammer so long that it has become more than a fly in the vise. It's a proof, the faint, lingering trace of the longstanding tradition of Southern fly dressing. And it's all there can be - where the written record is lacking, memory must suffice.

"Art is no part of southern life," William Faulkner asserted: "We need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage." Thus the annals of Southern Appalachian fly fishing are in the mouths of its anglers or on the ends of their lines. And, thus, the Yallerhammer. The art of any author is lasting. A book of fly dressings as old as the fifteenth century or the nineteenth-century manuscript record of a gentleman's angling club endures intact. But the art of the fly tier must always have dissolution as its goal. If they are well-tied and serve their purpose, the best flies will ravel eventually in a trout's jaw. 

It is unlikely that the angler who first lashed a yallerhammer’s primary to the shank of a hook and wound it to the eye died proudly for having left behind an icon of Southern fly tying. It was probably a simpler satisfaction - in having substituted the hackles of a mountain woodpecker for the shorebird hackles of the golden plover, that fly tier had brought the memory of a dressing from the North Country to North America and made it Southern Appalachia's own. "It's fine to think that you will leave something behind you when you die," Faulkner noted, "but it's better to have made something you can die with." It's the right sort of pride for a Southern angler and a very pleasant conjecture on the whole.

Dressed as a palmer, the Yallerhammer is not without precedent—perhaps the Scots-Irish settlers of these mountains applied the hackles from local game birds to their fly dressing traditions. In his Practical Fly-Fisher (1854), John Jackson recommended flies with dark bodies accented by a palmered, dingy-yellowish hackle: one is "A good Palmer for Spring," tied with a "body, green herl of Peacock, gold tinsel, green silk, with a greenish stained or grizzled Cock’s hackle over all." Such "greenish stained" hackle would likely take on a deep-yellow cast in a swift run. Jackson also notes that another “good general fly is a mottled hackle, from a Hen Grouse’s neck, wrapped in a body of brown Peacock’s herl and yellow silk," but its variant is more like the modern Yallerhammer: "N. B. Our local Anglers use a Golden Plover’s Hackle, and Tom Tit’s tail for the same purpose." Jackson's North Country contemporaries clearly had no qualms about substituting hackles - our Southern Highlanders were likely as quick to substitute the dingy-yellow primaries of their local yallerhammer for the dark ash-and-yellow hackles of the ocean-distant golden plover.

The tradition of Southern fly fishing, however old it may be, has been best documented recently, in books that include Don Howell and his son Kevin’s Tying and Fishing Southern Appalachian Trout Flies (1999), L. J. DeCuir’s Southeastern   Flies (1999), and Roger Lowe’s Fly Pattern Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains (2001). For all of these anglers, the Yaller Hammer, Yallarhammer Nymph, or Yellow Hammer, respectively, is a palmered nymph dressed on a standard nymph hook: a down eye, 2X long, 2X heavy hook with a perfect bend. 

This dressing of the Howell's “Yaller” Hammer uses yellow dyed bobwhite quail undercoverts rather than the primaries more typical of the dressing and does not use a clipped palmer hackle. As a concession to the size and type of hook and in keeping with the established patterns of the blog, I have used a size 14 dry fly hook rather than the heavier nymph hook these fly tier prescribe

Hook:		8-14
Thread:		Black
Tail:		Golden pheasant
Body:		Black floss or wool
Hackle:		Imitation “Yallar” Hammer feather palmered
		Much like the North Country’s Dotterell soft hackle, the Southern Appalachian Yallarhammer is now almost impossible to tie authentically. Its namesake hackle comes from the primaries of a protected bird, the yellow-shafted flicker. Don and Kevin Howell give an extensive treatment of the fly and the hackle in Tying and Fishing Southern Appalachian Trout Flies (1999), which is available from the Davidson River Outfitters. They note that the plumage of the yellow-shafted flicker has a “yellowish/black cast," so that local anglers know it alternately as a “Flicker, Yellow-Shafted Flicker, Golden-Winged Woodpecker, High-holer, Yellow Hammer, or ‘Yallar’ Hammer (the local pronunciation).” Don Howell suggested substituting yellow-dyed bobwhite quail or mourning dove primaries to simulate the distinctive "yellowish/black cast." The traditional dressing for the “Yallar” Hammer is the one he calls the “Yaller” Hammer Wooly Worm. “THREAD: Black uni-thread WIRE: .010 - .020 TAIL: Gold Pheasant BODY: Black floss or wool HACKLE: Imitation “Yallar” Hammer feather palmered through body.” Mr. Howell notes that the black-bodied dressing was the only dressing he knew, though he “did see some variations in color, including white, yellow and black. All versions seem to produce well, but the black one has always been my favorite.” He describes having had some success dressing the “Yaller” Hammer like a Woolly Bugger: “Instead of using Golden Pheasant for the tail, I’ve substituted maribou to match the color of the body. Also, at times, I add four to six strands of Crystal Flash to the tail.”

Mr. DeCuir notes that the “most common substitute for the original feather now is the Yellow Dyed Grizzly Hackle,” a much easier hackle to obtain already-dyed. It is reminiscent of Jackson's dressings. This fly is also dressed on a size 14 dry fly hook.

L. J. DeCuir nods to the tradition of Southern Appalachian fly tying in his Southeastern Flies (1999). While some anglers suggest the Yallerhammer is a child of Cherokee angling tradition, no record exists to support the supposition. DeCuir, on the other hand, suggests that the pioneers who settled Southern Appalachia in the western migration, beginning as early as the eighteenth century, “were not English gentlemen” who were “carrying with them the traditions of the dry fly developed on the Test and the Itchen.” Those dry fly traditions would not be codified in Great Britain until the mid-nineteenth century, and the settlers of the American Southeast were more often Scots-Irish than English anyway, more given to recollections of North Country and Highland fly dressing than chalk stream tactics. Mr. DeCuir notes his “suspicion that the nymph/wet fly pattern is closest to the original,” a suspicion that recalls a fly dressed hacklewise with a yellow-shafted flicker's hackle, much like a traditional soft hackle. DeCuir dresses his Yallerhammer on a hook from 4-14 with “Thread: Black Weight: “Lead” wire or substitute Palmered Ribbing: Yellow Dyed Grizzly Hackle Body: 2-5 strands of Peacock Herl depending upon size of the hook” In addition to this dressing, Mr. DeCuir includes five others, traditional (including yellow-shafted flicker hackle) and modern. As a “Classic Wet Fly Pattern,” he dresses the Yallerhammer on a wet fly hook: “Thread: Black Body: Peacock Herl Hackle: Split feather of Yellow Shafted Woodpecker (Flicker) tied on as a wet-fly collar”

This “Classic Wet-Fly Pattern” that Mr. DeCuir lists uses yellow dyed bobwhite quail as a substitute, like the Howells suggest, and is dressed on a size 14 dry fly hook.

In his Fly Pattern Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains (2001), Roger Lowe offers a similar dressing to those of the Howells and Mr. DeCuir, but he recommends grouse dyed yellow as a substitute for the split primaries of the traditional dressing, like Jackson's recommendation to use hen grouse on the palmers he recommended. Lowe lists two dressings. The first, the Yellow Hammer Nymph, is the more traditional and dressed thus, with black thread as Lowe illustrates it: “Tail: Long side of Grouse feather Body: Peacock herl Hackle: Dyed yellow Grouse feather” And the second: “Thread: Yellow silk Tail: Wood duck Hackle: Dyed yellow Grouse feather Body: Golden yellow floss The most common way of tying the popular Yellow Hammer pattern, can be fished wet or dry.”

This size 14 dressing of Mr. Lowe’s Yellow Hammer substitutes a yellow dyed bobwhite quail hackle for the yellow-shafted flicker hackle, rather than the yellow dyed grouse that Mr. Lowe suggests.