Sally Goodin

Sally Goodin has a date on it, which almost no fiddle tune does. Eck Robertson, a Texas fiddler then thirty four years old, played it alone into a Victor horn in New York on July 1, 1922. The disc that came out of those two days, with Arkansaw Traveler on the other side, is where the commercial country record business starts. Robertson took the tune through a dozen or so variations without stopping. Texas contest fiddling still works the way that record does: the tune is a frame, and the playing is what goes on inside it.

The name comes with a couplet and nothing else. Had a piece of pie and I had a piece of pudding, I gave it all away just to see Sally Goodin. No woman by that name turns up in the record, and Goodin rhymes with pudding, so the plainest explanation is probably the right one. Black Sally Goodin and Bear Creek Sally Goodin are different tunes that share the name, and when two players argue about how it goes, they are sometimes arguing about two tunes.

What keeps it in jams is how little there is to it. Both strains are short, both sit in A, and the melody hardly ever asks for a second chord. A room can play it on the one chord all evening with an E at the turn, and that is the reading written out here. The tune leaves space, everybody fills it differently, and no two recordings agree past the first pass.

On a mandolin the first strain lives on five notes, E, F sharp, A, B and C sharp, and the C sharp at the fourth fret of the A course is as high as it goes. The second strain walks up A, B, C sharp, D, E and back down, so the D at the fifth fret and the open E course finally come into it. Both strains close on the same falling B, A, F sharp, E. Get that phrase clean before the speed goes anywhere. After a few passes the notes are yours, and after a few dozen the variations start suggesting themselves.