Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane

As a compendium of the Liza Jane family of songs, Dan Gutstein's Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane represents an important intervention in both the musical history of the United States and African American folklore studies. Rich in detail and meticulously researched, Poor Gal maps out the evolution and numerous variations of “Little Liza Jane,” a folk song that most likely originated among enslaved people during the festive dances and cakewalks of antebellum Southern plantations. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the folk song traveled across the country along with its performers, crossing racial, ethnic, class, cultural, and geographic boundaries, and metamorphizing to fit local social contexts. The result has been dozens of renditions of “Little Liza Jane”—with many yet undiscovered—but all part of the chronicle of folk music in the United States.Poor Gal consists of 16 chapters with an introduction that narrates the theoretical framework of Gutstein's study. He grounds his examination of the Liza Jane songs in what he calls “sludge” theory, or a “collection of reminiscences that might challenge timelines or a sense of believability” suggesting “the existence of other, undiscovered materials” (p. 4). Gutstein connects this theory to the survival of “snatches” of folk melodies within the African American musical corpus, a concept articulated by composer and musician W. C. Handy in his autobiography Father of the Blues (Macmillan, 1941). To this framework, Gutstein adds “snotches of songs,” a phrase that Works Progress Administration (WPA) respondents often repeated during the late 1930s in what came to be known as the WPA Slave Narratives (p. 4).Chapter 1 focuses on Liza Jane's various appearances in the WPA interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans. As Gutstein explains, for decades, historians have problematized the accounts for a range of reasons: the respondents were elderly and thus their memories could be unreliable; the statistical representativeness of the informants is questionable; the older Black interviewees might have told their younger White interviewers (who represented the federal government) what they thought they wanted to hear and not what actually happened; transcription and communication issues probably occurred (i.e., what interviewers chose to write down, or not, and the accuracy of their notetaking); respondents were possibly edited to conform with one another; and their words and dialect were most likely altered to reinforce Black caricatures or rules of standard English. Nevertheless, Gutstein notes that the WPA Slave Narratives have become indispensable to the study of African American folklore, culture, and daily life in the South between the antebellum period and the early twentieth century because of the scarcity of direct firsthand accounts by people of color. In the context of the Liza Jane songs, the interviews are an important resource with respect to lyrics, music, and performance that may be used “critically and cautiously” (p. 10) in tandem with other sources—a process that Gutstein begins in this chapter and continues throughout Poor Gal.Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the connection between Liza Jane and “Dr. Adonis” (Stephen Byron Donahue), an Irish immigrant and journalist who popularized the songs in his newspaper articles during the Civil War, while chapter 4 analyzes her presence in Robert Burns’ poetry. In chapters 5 and 6, Gutstein takes a closer look at the plantation frolic culture that served as the origin of Little Liza Jane and how postwar minstrel, Jim Crow, and vaudeville shows adopted and adapted the songs.As Gutstein explicates in chapters 7 through 10, the songs crossed numerous color and class lines during the turn of the twentieth century. They were performed at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, known for its Native American boarding school (African Americans attended its other divisions); Liza Jane appeared in the fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Margaret Walker (read by Black and White audiences alike); and she was a popular staple in Tin Pan Alley and Appalachia, where she became a “poor gal.”Chapters 11 and 12 focus on the Jazz Age and the ways in which the musical and literary output of the period featured Liza Jane, while chapters 13 and 14 explore her entry into film, animation, radio, and television. The new media of the mid-twentieth century catalyzed her spread nationally and internationally, with the music of Bing Crosby, Fats Domino, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, and David Bowie incorporating Little Liza Jane (chapters 15 and 16).Each chapter of Poor Gal is replete with the lyrics of the most popular renditions of the Liza Jane family of songs, illustrating the evolution of the one-verse ballad from its plantation origins to its current position as a globally recognized part of US folklore. Out of the sludge of snatches and snotches emerges a complicated family tree, or network, of music that continues to grow and expand as scholars discover more versions.Throughout Poor Gal, Gutstein argues that the story of Little Liza Jane is by no means complete and that his work is simply an entrée into this vast world of culture in the United States. His inclusion of two appendices (for loose ends and sheet music for major variants) certainly reinforces this assertion. It also suggests that further research should and will be conducted in this area of musicology, thereby cementing the enduring legacy of Liza Jane in the twenty-first century.