Sally Sloane


Sally Sloane was possibly the most important Australian "source musician" to have been recorded during the Australian folk music revival of the 1950s and onwards; a number of her songs and tunes were passed down via her mother from her Irish grandmother, who emigrated to Australia in 1838. A resident of Lithgow, New South Wales and in her 60s at the time of her "discovery" by Australian folklorist John Meredith in 1954, she was an accomplished player of button accordion, fiddle and mouth organ as well as a singer. On a number of visits over the period 1954–1960, Meredith recorded over 150 items from her, which recordings are now in the collection of the National Library of Australia. She was also visited and recorded by other collectors and at least one LP recording of her singing, "A Garland For Sally", was released, by Warren Fahey's Larrikin Records.

Biography

Sally was born in 1894 at Parkes, New South Wales to Sarah and Tom Frost and was christened Eunice Evelyn Frost. Together, Sally and her twin sister Bertha were the youngest of 10 children born to their parents over a fourteen year period. It is not known when she began to be called "Sally", however the name is a diminutive of Sarah, which was the name of both her mother and grandmother.
Sally's maternal grandmother, Sarah Kenny, who died in 1889, was born in County Kerry in Ireland, and came to Australia by sailing ship when she was 22 years old. According to Sally's later conversations with John Meredith, her grandmother was a trained singer who knew many songs and dance tunes, many of which were later passed down to Sally via her daughter.
Sally's birth parents subsequently parted and her mother either married, or took up residence with William Clegg, an itinerant railway construction worker and former gold miner. Sally and her twin sister, Bertha, travelled with their mother and new stepfather around the railway camps, adopting the surname of Clegg which they used on subsequent official documents. While travelling with her mother and stepfather, Sally found she had the ability to learn songs and tunes easily and later said that, as well as from her mother, she learned songs from her stepfather and from others in Parkes, Aberdeen, Tambar Springs, and elsewhere. In 1911, aged 17, she married John Phillip Malycha, who by then went by the surname of Mountford, a 28 year old miner living at Ashley, near Moree, giving her name as Eunice Evelyn "Mary" Clegg. Sally and John lived at a number of locations in New South Wales and had five children within the first six years of their marriage.
It is not recorded what eventually happened to this marriage but it was certainly over by 1947, by which time Sally had formed a new relationship and was included in the New South Wales electoral roll as living in Lithgow, as Eunice Sloane, with Frederick Cecil Sloane, a grinder. Fred and Sally never married but presented themselves as husband and wife and remained together for over 35 years until Fred's death in 1980. The couple lived in Lithgow until 1956, when they moved first to Fennells Bay and then to Teralba, on the shore of Lake Macquarie, where Fred had work. In 1966, Fred's work there was complete and the couple returned to Lithgow, where they remained until Fred's death. Subsequently, Sally moved to Albury to stay with a niece, Jean, but unfortunately died following a tragic caravan fire on the property in which she was badly burned, at the age of 87.

Musical activities, repertoire and style

Sally's mother Sarah was musical, playing concertina, button accordion, jew's harp and piano, and sang many songs from the repertoire of her own mother. Sally inherited her mother's love of music, playing the instruments favoured by her mother as well as becoming an accomplished player on the fiddle, mouth organ and tin whistle. While still a youngster she was already playing for bush dances and sang at local gatherings. Sally also mentioned appearing on stage at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney on at least one occasion during the second world war, playing for soldiers.
In late 1954 or early 1955, John Meredith was performing in Lithgow with his pioneering "bush band" The Bushwhackers and as was his usual practice on the hunt for "bush singers", enquired whether there were any local singers he could visit. Fred Sloane was one of the organisers for the concert and told Meredith that his wife had a huge store of songs and tunes and could sing them "until the cows come home"; Meredith at first was inclined to disbelieve this but another of the group, Alan Scott was billeted with the Sloanes that weekend and confirmed the truth of Fred's assertion. Meredith lost no time in paying the Sloanes a visit on the next available occasion and returned numerous times, eventually recording over 150 items from her repertoire. A number of these were later released on the 1983 Larrikin Records LP, "A Garland For Sally". Meredith and the Sloanes enjoyed a close friendship, with Sally frequently contacting Meredith to tell him that she had remembered another song, or fragment thereof, with the result that Meredith visited the Sloanes on no less than 60 occasions; at one stage he was making the journey up to Lithgow every second month.
Meredith included Sally as one of the "true Australian tradition-bearers" at the inaugural Australian Folklore Festival, staged in Sydney in September 1955. She was also recorded performing 8 items for a 1957 Wattle Records release Australian Traditional Singers and Musicians, along with other musicians originally recorded by Meredith including Duke Tritton, Herbert Gimbert and Edwin Goodwin - only the last using Meredith's original recording, since the singer had subsequently died. Reviewing this release in Midwest Folklore in 1959, the eminent U.S. folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein wrote: "Mrs. Sloan is one of the great traditional singers of the world, certainly comparing favorably with the best to be offered in the English-speaking nations. And Mrs. Sloane's renditions on the button accordion and mouth organ are as delightful as her singing."
Sally was visited over the years by several other collectors including Warren Fahey and Graham Seal, Emily Lyle and Chris Sullivan, from the 1950s until the late 1970s. Former Bushwhacker and mouth organ player Harry Kay noted two Schottisches from her on a visit to him in Sydney in around 1968, while recordings made by Warren Fahey in 1976 are held in the National Library of Australia's Oral History and Folklore Collection.
Sally's performance style and repertoire, strongly influenced by the songs she learned orally, passed down by her Irish grandmother and mother, included original Irish ballads, English and Scottish traditional songs, bush ballads, and popular songs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that she learned from other musicians. Her Australian repertoire included such songs as "The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing", "The Wallaby Track", Henry Lawson's "Ballad of the Drover", "Click Go the Shears", and bushranger songs such as "The Death of Ben Hall" and "John Doolin", her version of "The Wild Colonial Boy"; it was songs like these that first attracted Meredith to Sally as an informant, however the survival of unique versions of Irish and British songs from the mid nineteenth century repertoire of her Irish grandmother can be viewed as equally if not more important from a folkloristic perspective.
Graeme Smith described her singing style in the following manner:
John Meredith, in his introduction to "The Sally Sloane Songbook", wrote:
A selection from Sally's repertoire was published posthumously as "The Sally Sloane Songbook". A listing of c. 144 items collected by John Meredith from Sally is given as an "extra" to the account of her life prepared by Valda Low, a more detailed list of tunes only was prepared by Ian Hayden in 2016, while Warren Fahey has put online a separate list of items of Sally's that he recorded.
She was made one of the earliest life members of the Sydney Bush Music Club, formed in 1954, and performed there on numerous occasions.

Discography