Goodbye Liza Jane

The title reached print after the war. Eddie Fox’s “Good Bye Liza Jane. Comic Song” was published by Lee & Walker in Philadelphia in 1871; Gutstein notes that it does not overtly lampoon Black people and offers rural themes and silly couplets. Harry von Tilzer’s “Good Bye Eliza Jane” (1903), by contrast, had a stereotyped cover and dialect lyrics, and sold as sheet music and on cylinders by Bob Roberts, Arthur Collins and Billy Murray. The versions that circulated later in the twentieth century and are played today descend, in Gutstein’s account, from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century play-party tradition, are not racial in character, and share only the title with the minstrel-era songs.

Charles Wolfe pointed to two 1920s recordings that helped spread the tune among early country musicians. The Hill Billies recorded it in New York City on 30 April 1926 as “Mountaineer’s Love Song” (Vocalion 5115), and the Tenneva Ramblers, another band from East Tennessee, recorded it in 1927 as “Miss ’Liza, Poor Gal” (Victor 21141). Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded it as “Good-bye, Liza Jane” for OKeh (45049) in 1926, and Bob Wills said it was the first tune he learned to fiddle.