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.

[3] Sally's maternal grandmother, Sarah Alexander, who died in 1889, was born in County Kerry in Ireland,[a] and came to Australia by sailing ship with her brother when she was 22 years old.

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.

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.

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,[2] at the age of 87.

[6] A photograph with the caption "Sally Sloan presiding over a birthday party, Lithgow circa 1943", also including an image of her mother (known as "Granny Clegg"), was published in the Bush Music Club online archive in 2020.

Reviewing this release in Midwest Folklore in 1959, the eminent U.S. folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein wrote: "Mrs. Sloan [sic] is one of the great traditional singers of the world, certainly comparing favorably with the best to be offered in the English-speaking nations.

Former Bushwhacker and mouth organ player Harry Kay noted two Schottisches from her on a visit to him in Sydney in around 1968,[12] while recordings made by Warren Fahey in 1976 are held in the National Library of Australia's Oral History and Folklore Collection.

Her vocal production occasionally showed some use of a theatrical projection and vibrato, but in the main she used a steady pitch and a relatively direct narrative approach typical of vernacular traditional style.

Her most used ornament is an emphatic upper grace note, executed with a vocal break, often on an accented beat, but also deployed to hold the drama of other individual pitches, particularly in songs delivered at a slower tact, for example in 'The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing'.