"Black Jack Grove" is an old-time breakdown in A Mixolydian ('A' part) & A Dorian ('B' part) {Phillips, Titon} or A Mixolydian ('A' part) & A Major ('B' part) {Silberberg}. It is played in standard or AEae fiddle tuning. The parts are played AB (Silberberg) or AABB (Phillips, Titon). Phillips notes that his source, Walter McNew, tended to blur the 'C' notes in the 'B' part of his unaccompanied version, resulting in a tonality somewhere between minor and major. Jeff Titon (2001) finds the title in tune lists from Berea College in 1915 and in the 1919 Berea fiddle contest list. The title presumably takes its name from a locale with a grove of blackjack oak trees. McNew learned "Black Jack Grove" from his father John McNew (b. 1888), a telegraph operator and depot agent for the L & N Railroad, who would play his fiddle between dispatches during the graveyard shift at his train depot. Walter thought that his father in turn had it from a man known to the family as 'Uncle' Garrett Bow, who used to visit with the elder McNew at the train depot where the two would swap tunes through the night. McNew was also highly influenced by neighboring Madison County, Ky., fiddler Doc Roberts, whom he knew and respected. It was printed in Milliner & Koken's Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011), Phillips' Traditional American Fiddle Tunes, vol. 2 (1995), Lamancusa's The Gettysburg Collection of Old-Time Fiddle Tunes (2021), Silberberg's Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern (2002) and The Complete Fiddle Tunes I Either Did or Did Not Learn at the Tractor Tavern (2007) and Titon's Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001). It was recorded by Walter McNew on Black Jack Grove (1993), Brittany Haas on Brittany Haas (2004) and Dirk Powell and John Hermann on Dirk Powell and John Hermann (1992).