Little Sadie

“Little Sadie” (also known as “Bad Lee Brown,” Laws I8, Roud 780) is a traditional American murder ballad, most commonly sung in a dorian mode, with roots documented across Appalachia and the Ozarks sitting at the crossroads of Anglo-American and African-American folk traditions. Cecil Sharp collected a fragment in 1918 from Virginia, and Vance Randolph collected another in 1922 in Missouri under the title “Bad Lee Brown” — making it one of the earlier-documented American ballads with a cross-racial lineage. Doc Watson himself described it as “sort of a ballad and blues combined.” The first sound recording, by Clarence Ashley in 1930, featured the song in “mountain modal” or “sawmill tuning” (gDGCD on banjo). Ashley and Doc Watson recorded it again for Smithsonian Folkways between 1960 and 1962 (released as The Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley 1960–1962, Smithsonian Folkways SF40029), and subsequent prominent versions include recordings by Johnny Cash, the Grateful Dead, Crooked Still, and George Thorogood.Curator’s note: Sharp’s “Satey” fragment is from the Cecil Sharp Manuscript Collection at Clare College, Cambridge not the English Folk Songs collection.