The American folk tradition known as old-time music is a
mixture of styles that were popular in rural southern communities
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fiddle tunes and
ancient ballads from the British Isles, African-American blues
and minstrel music, and sentimental pop songs gleaned from
sheet music all contributed to this music, which began to
leak out of the mountain hollers and be recorded and codified
in the 1920s.
While many people acknowledge the Celtic and blues influences
on old-time music, few see minstrel music as an obvious progenitor
of the old-time canon. Minstrel music was popular in the U.S.
in the mid-1800s and typically featured troupes of white musicians
done up in blackface imitating the music of southern blacks
(in an often derogatory fashion). Some minstrel songs, like
Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "My Old
Kentucky Home," have become favorites of 21st-century trad
balladeers, but many other minstrel tunes have survived primarily
as instrumentals. "Golden Slippers," written by the popular
African-American minstrel composer James A. Bland, and published
in 1879 by John F. Perry and Co. of Boston, is one of these.
Perhaps the melody works well without any lyrical embellishment,
or, more likely, modern tongues trip over lines like, "Oh,
dem golden slippers / Golden slippers I'm gwine to wear /
Upon de golden street." For whatever reason, "Golden Slippers"
has become a favorite among fiddlers and guitarists alike.
It seems to work particularly well on the guitar, as players
like Jon Sholle and Wyatt Rice have ably demonstrated.
"Golden Slippers" can be comfortably played on the guitar
in a few different keys. G is particularly popular, but playing
it in the key of C allows you to easily reach the melody in
two octaves in first position. Playing the tune in a different
octave is a common way to vary the melody without deviating
from it too much
In the version of "Golden Slippers" below, I've begun in
the lower octave. The A part is eight bars long and is played
twice, but the B part, while seeming to want to repeat after
eight bars, veers off halfway through the repeated melody
and ends differently. Notice that bars 18–22 are similar
to bars 10–14. In measures 18 and 20, though, I've added
quick chord strums to fill out the melody. They may be a little
tricky, so if you have trouble with them, just play the first
note of the measure as a half note (hold it for two beats)
and ignore the chord.
The melody jumps up to the higher octave in measure 26, hanging
out mostly on the E and B strings. The A part is virtually
a repeat of the lower-octave A part, but in the B part I've
imitated old-time fiddlers' slides into doubled open strings.
Notice that in measures 35–36 and 42–44, a slide
into the E note at the fifth fret of the B string is followed
by the open E string. I've also added a couple of quick chord
strums to the melody in measures 43 and 45.
Tune up