“Sally Goodin” and the Texas Fiddle Revolution

“Sally Goodin” (variously spelled) was the first tune associated with Eck Robertson in print (in an informative 1918 newspaper ad), the first he recorded alone (in 1922), and would remain the melody with which he would be most closely associated, both in his words and in countless newspaper articles. It is still the tune—in his performance—that fiddlers cite as his most important contribution to the development of contest fiddle variation technique. That belief is true in general: the bumper crop of variation in Eck’s performance has stimulated Texas fiddlers to try to match him in enthusiasm and thoroughness. But while some aspects of his “Sally Goodin” endure in a straightforward way in contest fiddling, other aspects of his compositional technique startled at the time, remain enigmatic, and are less thoroughly incorporated into modern fiddling. His “Sally Goodin” echoes formal devices common in Norwegian hardingfele music; he had spent much time around a Norwegian immigrant luthier. Several other possible influences on the formation of Eck’s fiddle style are also analyzed in this chapter.