“Golden Slippers” — full title “Oh Dem Golden Slippers” — was composed in 1879 by James A. Bland (1854–1911), an African American songwriter born in Flushing, New York, who became one of the most prolific composers of the minstrel-show era. Bland also wrote “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (later adopted as Virginia’s state song) and “In the Evening by the Moonlight.” “Golden Slippers” was originally a gospel-inflected song about the afterlife — the golden slippers are what the righteous wear when they meet in heaven — but the driving G-major melody crossed into the secular fiddle and dance repertoire almost immediately, the 6/8-inflected feel of the original translating naturally into a breakdown format.
By the early 20th century the vocal song had largely receded and the fiddle tune had taken on a life of its own, becoming a regular entry in fiddle contests and a staple of Southern string-band recording in the 1920s and 1930s. Country and old-time musicians who recorded it often had no knowledge of Bland’s authorship or the original gospel context; the tune had traveled far enough that its Black Tin Pan Alley roots were invisible at the folk level.
The featured recording is Butch Baldassari’s from Knee Deep in Bluegrass: The Acutab Sessions (2000). Baldassari — Nashville-based mandolinist, educator, and co-founder of the Nashville Bluegrass Band — performs the tune as a driving G-major instrumental, a treatment that reflects how fully Bland’s 1879 minstrel composition had been absorbed into the Appalachian-descended tradition it technically predates.