“Goodbye Liza Jane” belongs to the “Liza Jane” family of songs, which Dan Gutstein, in Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane (2023), traces to songs sung by enslaved people on southern plantations. The family includes “Li’l Liza Jane,” a separate if related song. Some variants were taken up by Civil War regiments, and others entered blackface minstrelsy. The first sheet music for “Good Bye Liza Jane” is Eddie Fox’s, published as a “comic song” by Lee & Walker of Philadelphia in 1871; the Levy Music Collection catalogues it as minstrel-show music in dialect. In 1903 the Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Von Tilzer published “Goodbye, Eliza Jane,” drawing on the minstrel versions, and it sold well as sheet music and on cylinders by Bob Roberts, Arthur Collins and Billy Murray.
The “Goodbye Liza Jane” that string bands and bluegrass musicians play today is a different line of descent. Gutstein argues that versions with titles or lines such as “Black Them Boots” come from the play-party tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are not racial in character, and share only the title with the minstrel songs. The couplets in the version sung by Hillary Klug fit that description: a hawk carries off a chicken, the singer chases a rabbit and a squirrel, boots are blacked until they shine, and the verses end with calls to swing partners and promenade. Each couplet is followed by the title line as a refrain.
Fiddlin’ John Carson recorded it as “Good-bye, Liza Jane” for OKeh (45049) in 1926, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys recorded it for Columbia (20555) in 1942; Wills and his band also performed it in the 1945 film Blazing the Western Trail. Klug, who sings and plays fiddle on it, included it on her album Howdy Y’All, which entered Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart in October 2020 and reached number 3.
