Golden Slippers

This one has a composer, and he deserves naming instead of being folded into the usual anonymous past. James A. Bland was a Black composer and banjo player, born on Long Island in 1854 into a family of free Black Americans. He wrote "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" in 1879 for the minstrel stage, as a parody of the spiritual the Fisk Jubilee Singers had carried around the world, and it sold over a hundred thousand copies by 1880.

Bland wrote hundreds of songs and copyrighted very few of them, which is how a man whose work was everywhere died poor in 1911. The tune outlived all of that. It became a fiddle staple, especially in the North, and it has been the unofficial theme of Philadelphia's Mummers Parade since the early 1900s, played up the street every New Year's Day. It traveled as a two-step from Appalachian dances to Irish-American dance halls, a long way from where it started.

The form on the page is the song's own. The verse is the first strain and repeats. The chorus is the second, written straight through instead of repeated, because the sung chorus runs its couplet twice and the ear waits for that shape. G is the best attested American key and the one written here, though D turns up often enough in the fakebooks that a call in D should not surprise you.

On a mandolin the verse chatters away on the second and third degrees of the scale, A and B, stepping between the open A course and the second fret above it with everything under one hand. The chorus is the payoff. It opens on a long low D, three beats of the open D course, that swells up to G for the "oh dem golden slippers" line. It holds an E over the C chord the same way, and then the dotted F sharp figure arrives and gives the two-step its strut. The whole tune spans a minor seventh, from the open D course up to the C at the third fret of the A course, and the fifth fret is as high as it climbs.