Liza Jane

Liza Jane is not one tune, it is a family of them. The Traditional Tune Archive numbers its Liza Janes up to nine, files Goodbye Liza Jane in three versions and Little Liza Jane in two, and carries Old Liza Jane, Big Liza Jane, Big Fat Liza Jane and I Lost My Liza Jane besides. Some are in A, some in D, some are fiddle breakdowns and some are songs, and players swap the titles around freely enough that two people who agree to play Liza Jane can start on different tunes. This page carries the plain one, the two strain song tune that old-time bands in the Kentucky and Tennessee tradition call by the bare name. The fiddle tune bluegrass players call Little Liza Jane, the J.P. Fraley one in A, has its own page on this shelf.

It is worth being clear about what it is not, because the confusion is easy and common. "Li'l Liza Jane" is a different song: its words were printed in 1904 in Anne Virginia Culbertson's At the Big House and the sheet music followed in 1916, credited to Countess Ada de Lachau and published in San Francisco. That one went into jazz and into school songbooks and is a New Orleans standard. The tune written out here is the fiddle and banjo one, older in tradition and untidier in its paper trail.

Words travel around this family the way titles do. The verses old-time singers hang on this tune are the mountain ones, going up on the mountain top to plant a patch of cane and making a jug of molasses to sweeten little Liza Jane. Something close to them was collected from Kentucky singers in the 1910s and printed for other tunes in the family, and the African American folklorist Thomas Talley published a related set in Negro Folk Rhymes in 1922 as "Rejected by Eliza Jane". Nobody agrees on which verses go with which tune, which is why there are none on this page: the melody is the part everybody shares.

On a mandolin the whole tune sits between the G at the fifth fret of the D course and the G at the third fret of the E course, one octave, first position, and it never touches the G course at all. The two strains are not the same shape at two heights, which is what a fiddle tune usually does. They share a middle instead: the third bar of each is the same bar note for note, and the fourth is the same held D written two ways. What differs is the opening, low and stepwise in the first strain and high and wide in the second. The one bar to slow down for is the seventh of the second strain, the two quick B naturals that start it. The tune has eighth notes in five places, and the other four are the two note lead-ins that walk out of a bar into the next one; this is the only pair that lands inside a bar, so it wants a down up before the beat arrives rather than after it.