Sail Away Ladies

Uncle Bunt Stephens, a fiddler from near Lynchburg, Tennessee, recorded Sail Away Lady for Columbia in New York in March 1926, and it is the first record of the tune anyone knows. Stephens had spent that winter in Henry Ford's fiddle contests. He won the one in Lynchburg, placed in Nashville and Louisville, and afterward claimed a national title that Ford never held a contest for.

Harry Smith put the record on his Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, the year after Stephens died, and judged the playing to be in a style older than the Civil War. The tune itself is older than the record, with no one source. It turns up as Great Big Taters in Sandy Land, and Kentucky fiddler Jake Phelps played it as Sail Away Huldy. Ira Ford printed it in Traditional Music in America in 1940.

Uncle Dave Macon and his Fruit Jar Drinkers recorded it in 1927 with a sung refrain, and British skiffle bands turned that refrain into Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O, a hit for the Vipers and for Lonnie Donegan in 1957, so a Tennessee square dance tune ended up on the British charts.

Fiddlers play it in G, and the mandolin gets it whole in first position. The low strain sits on the A and D courses and keeps coming back to the B on the second fret of the A course. The high strain climbs to the g on the E course and falls back through the same B, A, G, E the low strain uses. That shared ending is the hook, and it is also the bar to get clean first.