About This Song

Sail Away Ladies is a traditional fiddle tune from middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky. The first recording was made in 1926 by Uncle Bunt Stephens, a Tennessee fiddler, as an instrumental. A year later, in 1927, Uncle Dave Macon and His Fruit Jar Drinkers recorded it with words. Macon pieced those words together from floating verses and his own nonsense, and his version is where the familiar sung chorus comes from. Stephens' recording reached a wider audience when Harry Smith put it on his Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952.

The A part in the chart above is only two bars long. Even played twice it's over in four bars, half the length of the B part.