Sally Sloane
Sally (christened Sarah) Sloane was born at Parkes (NSW) in 1894. Her family were of Irish descent and nurtured a strong musical tradition of singing and instrumental music. Young Sally learned to play concertina, button accordion, jew’s harp and piano from her mother and also learned the fiddle, mouth organ and tin whistle. The sources of Sally’s extensive repertoire of Irish and Australian songs were her mother, her stepfather and other bush workers. Her singing and playing had a characteristic Irish lilt that distinguished it from other British-derived musical traditions.
An accomplished musician and singer, Sally performed at many locations around Lithgow, Parkes and Teralba and during World War 2 appeared at the famous Sydney Tivoli in troop benefit concerts. Just as she had learned her songs and tunes from within the family, so Sally passed her skills and repertoire to the next generation. The John Meredith Tape Collection in the National Library of Australia contains, among many other jewels, a superb duet of ‘Miss McLeod’s Reel’ performed by Sally on harmonica and her son Les on jew’s harp. (Tape 10B Item 15)
Sally’s outstanding musical ability and her extraordinary repertoire of ballads attracted the interest of many folklorists, including John Meredith, Edgar Waters, Warren Fahey and Graham McDonald. She was – and probably remains - the best-documented traditional singer and musician in Australia and features in many published and recorded works. A very rough and conservative estimate of her repertoire based on the John Meredith recordings held by the National Library (1954-1961) and other recordings of Sally made by Warren Fahey suggest she could perform on request at least 60 tunes and nearly 80 songs. She was also a better than fair spinner of yarns and a repository of local lore and legend about Ben Hall and other bushrangers of the Forbes district.
Sally’s broad repertoire was very much a joining of four major streams of Anglo Celtic musical traditions found in Australia. One stream consisted of mainly nineteenth century British broadside ballads such as ‘The Banks of Claudy’ and ‘The Red Barn’, a version of the best-selling English ballad on the murder of the pregnant Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder in 1827. This stream also included rural English folksongs, such as ‘The Green Bushes’ and a strong helping of Irish street ballads and other traditional songs, such as ‘My Son Ted’ and ‘If I Was A Blackbird’.
A second stream was made up of a number of the older ballads like ‘Molly Baun Lavery’, which draws on an ancient international story of a young hunter who mistakes his true love for a swan and kills her. Also included here were some rarely recorded traditional carols such as ‘Christ Was Born in Bethlehem’.
Australian traditional material formed a broad third stream, including poems of Henry Lawson and other poets set to music. One of many outstanding ballads in Sally Sloane’s extensive repertoire was ‘Ben Hall’, a lament on the 1865 shooting of this folk outlaw hero by police as the bushranger slept. Like many of the Ben Hall ballads it portrays the outlaw in distinctly Australian terms. The song begins:
Come, all you young Australians and everyone besides,
I’ll sing to you a ditty that will fill you with surprise,
Concerning of a ‘ranger bold whose name it was Ben Hall,
But cruelly murdered was this day, which proved his downfall.
and ends:
It’s through Australia’s sunny clime Ben Hall will roam no more.
His name is spread both near and far to every distant shore.
For generations after this parents will to their children call,
And rehearse to them the daring deeds committed by Ben Hall.
A fourth stream of Sally’s song and tunes flowed from the popular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with songs like ‘Boys of the Dardanelles’, ‘The Coolgardie Miner’ and her robust accordion rendition of ‘McNamara’s Band’. These streams ran together into a wide and deep river of Australian traditional music that Sally ferried with great skill.
Sally Sloane was a lively and friendly woman who made collectors welcome with cups of tea and more than enough to eat. Well aware of her celebrity status among folklorists, she was extremely generous as a performer, Warren Fahey and I recording over forty items from her in one memorable day at her Lithgow home in 1976. As with many traditional singers, Sally’s music was tied closely to the rhythms of family life and domestic routine and she would sing many of her songs as she did the washing up.
Sally Sloane died in 1982 but the extensive and important traditions of which she was an extraordinary bearer live on in the many recordings she made for collectors. You can listen to a large selection at https://sallysloane.wordpress.com/
Graham Seal (from Verandah Music: Roots of Australian Tradition)
