“Sally Ann” is a fiddle and banjo breakdown from the upland South, found in Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia and usually played in D. It belongs to a knot of related tunes that includes “Sandy Land,” “Great Big Taters in Sandy Land” and “Sail Away Ladies.” In Franklin and Floyd Counties, Virginia, one version goes by “Dineo,” and the Blue Ridge Highballers recorded it as “Darneo.” Words go with it too. In 1918 the English collector Cecil Sharp took down verses from Mrs. Dellie Hughes of Burnsville, North Carolina, beginning “O where are you going, Sally Anne.”
An early and influential commercial recording was made in New York on 15 January 1925 by the Hill Billies. Tony Alderman played fiddle, Al Hopkins piano, Joe Hopkins guitar and John Rector banjo. OKeh issued it on 40336, backed with “Cripple Creek,” and the band recorded it again for Vocalion in October 1926. At a 1927 Columbia session in Atlanta, the Ashe County, North Carolina, fiddler Frank Blevins recorded it at sixteen with his brother Ed on guitar and Fred Miller on banjo. The band name, Frank Blevins and His Tar Heel Rattlers, was invented on the spot at the session.
Around Galax, Virginia, and the Round Peak section of Surry County, North Carolina, a three-part version is played with the fiddle in ADae tuning, and the tune has been jokingly called the Surry County national anthem. Tommy Jarrell learned it from his father, the fiddler Ben Jarrell, and from Tony and Charlie Lowe. Their version adapted an older one he called “old-timey Sally Ann,” and it was shaped by fiddle and banjo playing together rather than by solo fiddling. He picked up the third part at about fourteen, just over the Virginia line, and brought it home to local players. Alice Gerrard remembered Wade Ward handing his fiddle to a stranger at a Galax auction sale and telling him, “there’s not a man alive that can’t play Sally Ann.”
