“Li’l Liza Jane” and its bright, catchy folk lyrics are a piece of American history. Also known as “Little Liza Jane,” “Liza Jane,” and “Goodbye Lizzy,” the song stems from the antebellum South and spans generations, genres, and cultures—from Nina Simone’s 1960 emotional arrangement to David Bowie’s 1964 rock ’n’ roll rendition. To this day, the one-verse song, with no original sheet music, continues to travel across time and space, but it has a sturdy root or two in the D.C. area.
The “Liza Jane” songs are believed to have originated among enslaved people, who used the folk tune at celebratory dances, according to D.C. native Dan Gutstein, author of Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane. During the Civil War (1861 to 1865), the tune spread, picked up by traveling regiments, and, after the war’s end, these “one-verse songs” became embedded in popular culture, passed down for decades despite being improvised for each dance or celebration.
“There was no organized ancestor, meaning there was no sheet music, songbook publication, etc. before the Civil War ended,” says Gutstein, who’s also a former punk and jazz vocalist. “It was all word of mouth, and ‘Liza Jane’ songs had spread around the South by the time the war concluded.”
According to Gutstein, the greatest single “Liza Jane” D.C story involves the 43rd United States Colored Troops Regiment. Organized in Philadelphia and comprised entirely of Black men, the regiment moved south on foot and via railroad in April 1864 to encamp for a few days in Annapolis, where some of its soldiers were overheard singing the refrain “Goodbye Liza Jane” to a group of women who had come to wish them well.
Variants of the song were used in popular culture, which adopted some “Liza Jane” songs, including “Goodbye Liza Jane,” which was published as sheet music in 1871. Some versions of “Liza Jane” were recorded from the late 1890s into the early 1900s. Another version circulated among Tin Pan Alley, a collection of music publishers and songwriters in New York City, which spurred recordings, sheet music sales, and performances. But the most important sheet music publication for “Little Liza Jane” was done by songwriter Countess Ada de Lachau in 1916. The publication led to a slate of new recordings as well as the song’s placement in a songbook given to all of the soldiers headed to World War I. The songs also appeared in films such as 1929’s Coquette and early Mickey Mouse cartoons in 1930.
Beyond the formal publication of sheet music and features in films, Black folk tradition is also responsible for keeping “Little Liza Jane” alive. Gutstein notes, “I believe that Nina Simone learned her rendition of the song through folk tradition and not pop culture.”
Ultimately, the Federal Writers’ Project, a subsidiary agency of the Works Progress Administration—established in 1935 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt—formally documented the songs’ history. In the late 1930s, the FWP conducted interviews for the Slave Narrative Collection, which led to nearly a dozen people sharing memories of singing “Liza Jane” songs while they were enslaved.
“Virtually all of the women and men recalled singing these songs at dances or celebrations,” Gutstein says. “While these interviews were conducted in the South, it was the machinery of government here in Washington, D.C., that created the program, to begin with.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t clear documentation on whether Liza Jane was an actual person. Gutstein’s six years of research found that the song chronicles a reluctant lover of courting age—roughly between 18 and 20. “Liza Jane became a sort of ubiquitous to ‘every woman’ who resisted courtship,” says Gutstein. “The singer keeps promising her things—a ring, a house, all sorts of clothes, etc.—if only she’ll say yes. But she often never says yes.”
Gutstein’s interest in the “Liza Jane” songs began while he was DJing at Adams Morgan’s now-defunct Black Squirrel in 2017. “I would play music from this wild period in American music between the arrival of Elvis and the Beatles—I call it the Shaker era because many songs just shake you,” Gutstein says. He found himself digging for vinyl when he came across the Art Neville recording of “Little Liza Jane” from 1965. Immediately intrigued, Gutstein started looking into the song’s layered history, uncovering different variants of the song while also doing archival research; it eventually led to Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane, which came out in November 2023, courtesy of University Press of Mississippi.
Beyond Poor Gal, Gutstein is also working on a documentary about the song. The film, which is currently still in development, features Phil Wiggins, a D.C. native and National Heritage Fellow for his Piedmont blues harmonica playing, as well as DMV jazz radio host and producer Bobby Hill, and the late Faye Moskowitz, a former George Washington University professor. Using the working title Li’l Liza Jane, Gutstein hopes to release the doc in 2025 or 2026 once funding is secured.