vrteach - Posted - 03/22/2013:  13:57:22

I'm doing a song this time. It's one of my favorites to play and not coincidentally one of the few songs that I can consistently pull out of my hat. This is NOT the Goodbye Liza Jane that most of the BHO jukebox entries have, but rather the one that was recorded by Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers (I think Odell Smith fiddle, Charlie Poole banjo/vocal, and Roy Harvey guitar) on September 9, 1930 in New York City. I believe it was his last recording session. By they way, I'm also posting this on Poole's birthday (born March 22, 1892)

You can hear his version on Archive.org:

archive.org/details/CharliePoo...aRamblers (it's the 9th one down in the player)

However, that's not where I first learned this song. The first time I remember hearing the song was at a festival in Minneapolis/St Paul either in the fall of 1978 or spring of 1979. Bob Bovey played it on clawhammer banjo along with a string band of the Twin Cities at that time called "Mad Jack and the Black Label Boys". It appealed to me, and I played around a bit that evening. It was perhaps a year later that I got a Highwoods String Band LP with "Goodbye Miss Liza Jane" on it, and that's were I finally learned the lyrics. You can hear a snippet of that on Amazon:

amazon.com/Goodbye-Miss-Liza-J...0010VJ19E

Over the years I didn't know if Poole composed it himself, or if it was based on someone else's song. I probably would not have figured it out myself, but Kinney Rorrer had the answer in his biography of Poole. The original was written by Andrew Sterling and Harry von Tilzer, copyrighted 1903 with the title Good Bye Eliza Jane.

Here is the rather embarrassing cover of the sheet music, and the full document is available from Duke University Library.

The Library of Congress National Jukebox has a 1904 recording of Bob Roberts singing "Good Bye Eliza Jane" with that remarkable diction of the pre-electric-amplification singers (even when singing lines like "I'm a-gwine to leave you") :

loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/5951/

It is definitely the same song, but Poole and band have improved the flow of the lyrics as well as the melody, in my opinion.

I don't play in Poole's style, but it is awfully fun in clawhammer. I'm attaching two things. First an audio I recorded about 4 years ago when I was sitting in my office waiting for a computer to finish doing something. And today I did a low-production-value video of me playing the melody through twice at a fairly moderate tempo to give you some idea of the arraignment that I came up with all those years ago. I play it in plain-old open G.

Edited by - vrteach on 03/22/2013 14:41:33

Goodbye Miss Liza Jane

VIDEO: Goodbye Sweet Liza Jane, melody fairly slow (click to view)

aeroweenie - Posted - 03/22/2013:  19:44:05

Very nicely done!   In the 1970s, I had a Charlie Poole album and this was one of the songs on it.  This was one of the songs that caught my ear.  However, C. Poole was not my cup of tea at the time (still isn't.  Gasp!) and I traded the album.

MileStretch - Posted - 03/23/2013:  04:44:02

Great write-up and great playing!

bhniko - Posted - 03/23/2013:  07:52:37

Enjoyed going to school today and sitting in your class...good lesson...well demonstrated...do another one.

camcumberland - Posted - 03/23/2013:  09:13:09

Great write-up, and a very cool tune! I gave it a try.

VIDEO: Goodbye Sweet Liza Jane (click to view)

janolov - Posted - 03/24/2013:  01:27:32

Charlie Poole is great and I am glad to see that becomes a TOTW.

The story behind Charlie Poole's Goodbye Sweet Liza Jane seems to be similar to Leaving Home (usually known as Frankie and Albert or Frankie and Johnny). Both seems to be based on old sheet notation but Poole developed the lyrics and the melody (I wonder if he actually studied the printed notation or if he have heard others play it?).

vrteach - Posted - 03/24/2013:  12:08:35

Thanks guys. camcumberland: I'm at home on dial-up so can't get an uninterrupted download of your video, but what I could get sounds great.



What I enjoy about Poole is that he took pop songs that I probably wouldn't pay much attention to in their original form, and often produced something that I enjoy and can play.



At the last Illinois fiddlers contest one of the youngsters played something called "Come Take A Trip in My Air Ship" for her waltz. When I asked where it came from, the answer was a combination of sheet music (1904) and a Charlie Poole version from 1928 (titled Once I Loved a Sailor).



Here is a link to a youtube posted by Alan Kaufman in which he replaced the original soundtrack for a Dave Fleischer cartoon (probably early 1930s) with Poole's version.



youtube.com/watch?v=ex9QWdDc5VE

JanetB - Posted - 03/27/2013:  19:59:05

Thanks, Erich, for posting something a little different and new for my listening ears.  I've been curious about Charlie Poole's picking style and the link you gave us to his recordings is quite extensive.  I'd enjoy your song if you were singing in a jam and think I could follow along.