“Oh! Dem Golden Slippers” was written by James Bland and published in Boston in 1879 by John F. Perry & Co. as a “Song & Chorus,” words and music by Bland. Bland (1854–1911) was a Black songwriter and minstrel performer. He was born to a free family in Flushing, New York, and played the banjo professionally from his teens. The same year he published “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” and his “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was Virginia’s state song from 1940 to 1997. By 1880 “Golden Slippers” had sold more than 100,000 copies.
It is a minstrel-stage song written in the manner of a spiritual, and apparently a parody of the spiritual “Golden Slippers,” which the Fisk Jubilee Singers had popularised after the Civil War. Sung in stage dialect, it has the singer putting away his golden slippers, long-tailed coat and white robe for a chariot ride in the morning. The later verses reunite him with his family and tell the children to get ready for their own ride. The song became the theme of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade.
From the minstrel stage the melody passed into fiddling tradition, and Bland’s name often fell away as it went. Song collections printed it without credit to him, and folklorists noted it in oral tradition in the early 20th century, among them the compilers of Frank C. Brown’s Folk Songs from North Carolina. Fiddlers have played it as a reel, a two-step and a polka, in D, C, G or F. It was especially widespread in the northern states, though a 1929 notice for a contest at Grove Hill, Alabama, listed it among the tunes that “assuredly would be rendered.”
The Dykes Magic City Trio recorded it in New York on 11 March 1927, with John Dykes on fiddle, Myrtle Vermillion on autoharp and Hub Mahalley on guitar. Brunswick issued it on 128, backed with “Hook and Line.” The Fiddler’s Companion lists 78s by Lonnie Austin (Brunswick, 1929) and an unissued 1928 Gennett session by the Tweedy Brothers of Wheeling, West Virginia. Among later recordings is Clark Kessinger’s on the Folkways LP Live at Union Grove.
