“Goodbye Liza Jane” belongs to a large and tangled family of Liza Jane songs, and it is not the same piece as “Li’l Liza Jane,” with which it is often confused. The earliest published score of this one is Eddie Fox’s “Good Bye Liza Jane,” issued by Lee & Walker in Philadelphia in 1871 and billed on its cover as a comic song — rural themes and silly couplets rather than the crueller material of the minstrel stage it came from. It spread widely after the Civil War, and in 1903 Harry Von Tilzer published a related “Goodbye, Eliza Jane” that sold well in sheet music and on cylinder.
What southern string bands kept was the refrain and a handful of couplets that deliberately refuse to add up to a story. A hawk catches a chicken and flies upstairs. “Oh how I love her, ain’t that a shame.” Black my boots and make them shine. Up the river and round the bend, six-shooter gone and gone again. Liza Jane had a dress of red, queen of hearts or so she said. Every couplet is answered by the title line, which is the entire chorus.
Hillary Klug, a fiddler and buck dancer working out of Tennessee, recorded it in 2021 for Howdy Y’All on FiddleFeet Records, her second album, in a set that also holds “Pretty Polly,” “Handsome Molly” and “The Cuckoo.”
