“Saro Jane” — more fully “Rock About My Saro Jane” — is a traditional riverboat song. It is generally thought to date to around the time of the Civil War, and it most likely originated among the African American stevedores who loaded and unloaded the steamboats of the Cumberland and Mississippi rivers.
The song reached records through Uncle Dave Macon, the Tennessee banjoist and Grand Ole Opry star, who recorded it in 1927. Macon said he had learned it decades earlier from Black dock workers in Nashville. Its lyric is a roustabout’s song, full of riverboat troubles and Civil War echoes, though some of its phrases have puzzled scholars ever since.
The song passed into old-time and bluegrass tradition as a bright, rolling favorite.
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