“Sally Goodin” (also spelled “Sallie Gooden”) is a breakdown and play-party tune from the upland South, usually played in A. Vance Randolph, who recorded Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s, said it had been popular at Ozark play-parties in the 1890s. The tune also had words, sung less often now than in the past, such as “Had a piece of pie, had a piece of puddin’, / Give it all away to see Sally Goodin’.”
Where the name came from is disputed. Eck Robertson told of a maiden who called fiddlers from all around to a contest and promised herself to the winner, a young man named Gooden. Byron Berline’s version has two fiddle-playing suitors, the winner surnamed Goodin, and a marriage that produced fourteen children, which let him play the tune fourteen different ways. The North Carolina musician Bruce Green collected a third story from Hiram Stamper, a Knott County, Kentucky, fiddler born in 1893 who had learned from Civil War veterans. In that story the tune was once called “Boatin’ Up Sandy,” and soldiers attached to John Hunt Morgan’s irregulars renamed it for Sally Gooden, who kept a boarding house on the Big Sandy River in Pike County and let them camp and play on her land.
Robertson, a Texas contest fiddler, and the Civil War veteran Henry Gilliland went to Victor’s New York office in the summer of 1922 after a Confederate reunion in Richmond, Virginia. According to Robertson, his audition piece was “Sallie Gooden,” and the Victor man stopped him halfway through and told him to come back the next morning. The pair recorded four duets on 30 June. Robertson returned alone on 1 July and recorded “Sallie Gooden” in AEAE tuning, playing the tune and then twelve variations on it. Victor 18956, with the duet “Arkansaw Traveler” on the other side, was released on 1 September 1922 but did not circulate widely until the spring of 1923. The Library of Congress added the record to the National Recording Registry in 2002.
Other fiddlers soon recorded it, and Guthrie Meade counted twenty-nine early 78s. Uncle Am Stuart recorded it for Vocalion in 1924, Uncle Dave Macon in 1925, and Bill Shores with Riley Puckett in Atlanta in 1926 as “Sally Goodwin.” The Skillet Lickers recorded it in 1929. In 1939 Herbert Halpert recorded it for the Library of Congress from the Mississippi fiddler John Brown. On 23 August 1967 Bill Monroe took Byron Berline into Columbia’s Nashville studio to record it with the Blue Grass Boys (Roland White, guitar; Vic Jordan, banjo; James Monroe, bass). Berline’s version stays close to Robertson’s 1922 recording.
