Little Liza Jane

There is a whole family of Liza Jane tunes and songs, and the shelf's plain Liza Jane page sorts the family out. This page carries the one old-time fiddlers and bluegrass pickers mean when they say Little Liza Jane: an eastern Kentucky fiddle tune in A with two strains and every note out of the major pentatonic. It is not the 1916 sheet-music song "Li'l Liza Jane" that jazz bands and New Orleans play, though the two share a name and a family. That one was credited to Countess Ada de Lachau, and its words were printed by Anne Virginia Culbertson in 1904. Dan Gutstein's research traces the whole family back to enslaved people's frolics on southern plantations, with Civil War regiments on both sides singing variants and the minstrel stage picking up "Goodbye Liza Jane" in 1871.

J.P. Fraley, who lived from 1923 to 2011 and fiddled in Rush, in eastern Kentucky, is where the fiddle tune comes from for most players. He recorded it cross tuned in A on Wild Rose of the Mountain, which Rounder put out in 1972, and it is printed under his name in the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes.

Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded it in A on So Long So Wrong in 1997, with Adam Steffey on mandolin, at a tempo that scared people. The track won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance, and that is the record most bluegrass jams learned the tune from. John Reischman plays it in D on Harmonic Tone Revealers, and the Nashville Grass cut it in G with the strains in the other order, so at a jam it pays to ask what key before the kickoff.

A is the fiddle key and it sits well on a mandolin. The tune leans on the open A course and the open E course, and the pentatonic means there is no fourth or seventh anywhere to fret. Most of it is quarter notes and held notes with a few pairs of eighths between them, which is why it makes a good first tune. The one thing to practice is the tie. The e held across the bar line in the first strain, and the c and the B held in the second, want to ring on rather than be picked a second time. The second strain opens on the same A the first strain landed on, so hold it and count.