Stephen Foster
American popular music in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries is an historical hotbed of mimetic activity.
Since the dimmest awareness of a unified national consciousness began to glow in the American psyche, American popular music has been the playground where her constituent subcultures most conspicuously, yet subtly, imitated each other, and defined themselves with and against one another.
The most pressing dilemma of America’s nascent definition of itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries was, and arguably remains today, the divisive legacy of slavery—and America’s moral bipolarism surrounding the subject. Minstrelsy became one way of negotiating that subject.
Politics is always another form of negotiation, often related to music.
Thomas Jefferson drafted an early version of the Declaration of Independence decrying this “amalgamation of horrors,” accusing King George III of waging:
cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
Yet, as every activist and elementary-school student in America now knows, despite his philosophical Enlightenment aversion to this “peculiar institution,” and his ongoing legislative efforts to abolish it, Jefferson continued to keep over 600 slaves himself, one of whom became his teenage mistress, and birthed several offspring of Jefferson’s own blood, who became slaves themselves.
Jefferson’s passage against slavery was redacted from the Declaration of Independence after he sent the first draft to, among other people—John Adams (remember that, when we come to Stephen Foster).
In his autobiography years later, Jefferson ultimately blamed the removal of his anti-slavery passage on Southern delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, and Northern delegates representing merchants who were actively involved in the financial, material benefits of the Trans-Atlantic trade themselves.
Part of the reason Jefferson placed the blame for this institution on the British crown, and a key concern of revolutionary delegates, was the fear that this “piratical warfare,” as Jefferson called slavery, might be used against the colonies.
In 1775, Britain issued a proclamation promising any enslaved person in the colonies who volunteered to join the British army in its fight against American revolutionaries their freedom. Many enslaved Americans sought emancipation behind British lines.
This historical tidbit has led some revisionists, like the author of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, to reinterpret the entire cause of the American Revolution as a fight to preserve the institution of slavery.
There is partial justification for such claims, but at the very least, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist, has been accused by several historians of playing fast-and-loose with the facts, and employing a specious version of American history for ideological, activist ends. (One of the historians requesting the New York Times to issue corrections about the 1619 Project happens to be my favorite Bob Dylan scholar as well.)
I’ll address the complicated, fascinating story of Nikole Hannah-Jones in later articles, and link to one of the deepest pieces of journalism I’ve encountered in the past several years, concerning this complicated figure. (It’s a long-read, and readers may benefit by waiting for The Third Ear to introduce certain background characters, journalists, and histories before reading “The Making of Nikole Hannah-Jones,” but if you wish to jump ahead, you find the article, here.)
Regardless of how-and-why the American Revolution occurred, it’s hard to overstate the lingering psycho-social impact of chattel slavery, yet equally hard to discuss its implications in an open national dialogue. The attitude towards Afro-Americans in the United States has been anything but united. The country’s original sin, as James Madison called the slave trade, was, historically, something to be repressed. It resides in the national subconscious, way down there (deeper and deeper), in the South.
As a Black Studies professor told me years ago, it may be that the only demographic it remains socially-acceptable to be openly-prejudiced against in the United States today, are Southerners. America has long projected its racial anxieties onto the South—part of the basis for Southern Gothic fiction.
Which brings us to the subject of this post, Stephen Foster.
Some critics and historians, like Eric Lott and Constance Rourke, point to blackface minstrelsy as post-Columbian America’s first original art form. (Others have pointed to the Afro-European mash-up known as jazz, as America’s first classical art form.)
Many people, in-and-out of academia, have drawn comparisons between blackface minstrelsy and the imitation of black music in rock & roll, enough that it has become an ironical truism of pop sociology. An article of street wisdom, often noted, but soon dismissed with a wink-and-a-nod, followed by a head-shake: “Sure, rock & roll is just a bunch of stolen blues riffs, man!—But c’mon.”
The implication being that early rock & roll derived most of its chops from country and blues, but begat a wholly original style, beyond “Love and Theft.” That may be true, to an appreciable extent. But the two-hundred year mimetic cycle that is the history of American popular music (and literature), is more complicated.
Stephen Foster, “the father of American music” known for such popular classics as “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races,” was American-as-Apple-Pie and Born-on-the-Fourth-of-July.
At the very hour the Liberty Bell was tolling the death of Thomas Jefferson, sounding peals of mourning over the streets of Philadelphia, PA, in the western part of that state, Stephen Collins Foster was born.1
It was July 4, 1826, the semi-centennial of American Independence—her 50th birthday.
Later that day, another founding father, John Adams, joined Jefferson, and broke-on-through to the Other Side. It was an auspicious beginning, heralding the birth of “the first great American songwriter,” Stephen Foster.
Foster’s forte was “Ethiopian songs,” a musical genre that made him America’s first professional music publisher on a national scale—sentimental ballads about the American South that romanticized plantation life; the lyrics were written in black dialect.
It’s important to note that, while many of Foster’s songs make clear his speakers are slaves, and thus his lyrics are understood as “black dialect,” linguistic historians find virtually no distinction between African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and white Southern American English (SAE) during this period.
Slaves spoke in Southern accents exactly as the masters they were, in certain ways, imitating (mimesis). It wasn’t until later, during the Civil Rights era, that white SAE and black AAVE began to diverge, as the two groups began “to stigmatize linguistic variables associated with the other group” (alterity)—according to Erik R. Thomas in “Rural White Southern Accents” (2003)).
As far as Foster’s “Ethiopian Songs” are concerned, “Ethiopian” was a popular nineteenth-century euphemism for “black,” but it’s also a term of distinction that lends an ironic connotation of individual freedom and dignity to the imaginary African Americans in Foster’s idyllic songs.
Ethiopia was historically regarded as the only “Christian” culture in Africa—even claiming to house the Ark of the Covenant in the Church of Mary of Zion, a relic which, according to legend, has since been moved to the adjacent Chapel of the Tablet, built by the last emperor of Ethiopia, and Messiah of Rastafarianism, Haile Selassie, in the 1950s.
Ethiopia was also considered the only African nation to remain unconquered by European colonial power—until the founding of Liberia by American freed slaves returning to Africa (1822-1847).
Songs like Foster’s were called “Ethiopian” for the same reason that Afro-Americans in the Harlem Renaissance would use the word “Ethiopian,” as a signifier of distinction.
The difference, of course, is that in minstrel songs the Ethiopian distinction was, at the very least, partially-ironic, in the same way that slaveowners gave their slaves dignified classical Greco-Roman names like “Socrates,” “Ulysses,” or “Virgil.”
While Foster’s most popular songs were, almost exclusively, idealized depictions of antebellum Southern life, he apparently saw the South only once in his lifetime, from the Mississippi River, on a honeymoon cruise in 1852.
It’s possible that when Foster enjoyed his first sexual encounter, he was in what was, for him, exotic territory. It was hot and wet on the Mississippi, and the experience seems to have stuck with him; the South left a sultry impression.
His songs, which some have painted as the result of a sexualized fondness for the South, are the bedrock of the American songbook, in terms of musical publishing—the first American sheet music to become wildly popular. They are also part of the bedrock of America’s imaginary conception of “the South.”
In the twentieth-century, America would celebrate bowdlerized historical revisions of Stephen Foster songs like “Oh! Susanna” by the likes of James Taylor and Carly Simon, updated from Foster’s black dialect to contemporary American English vernacular.
Yet even describing James Taylor and Carly Simon’s versions as less-offensive, contemporary American English “vernacular,” still suggests the origins of such modern pop versions of Stephen Foster songs, in black plantation life.
As Henry Louis “Skip” Gates points out (alluding to Houston A. Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory), “vernacular” is:
a word taken from the Latin vernaculus (“native”), in turn taken from verna (“slave born in a master’s house”)
(I owe the etymology above to Gates’ Signifying Monkey.)
In the twenty-first century, even outside of academia, it has become de rigueur to point fingers at the original, racially-charged lyrics of traditional American songs like “Old Black Joe” (black speaker hears his friends calling him to the afterlife) and “Nelly Was a Lady” (spoken in dialect by Nelly’s husband lamenting the death of his “dark Virginny bride”).
Woke consciousness is hip to the fact that, after the speaker of “Oh! Susanna” comes “from Alabama/wid my banjo on my knee,” in the second verse, he jumps “aboard de telegraph/And trabbled down de riber” where—blah blah blah… the N-word.
Despite such cultural awareness and sensitivity, the first Google search result for “Oh! Susanna” remains, literally and metaphorically, Taylor’s or Simon’s version. Underneath it, way down there (deeper and deeper), the second result will be a Wikipedia entry explaining that “Oh! Susanna” is a minstrel song written by Stephen Foster (1826-1864), first published in 1848.
At least, that was the case in 2019, when I began drafting this history. Since the so-called racial reckoning of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Google seems to have updated its SEO algorithm, and the Stephen Foster version of “Oh! Susanna” is now the first search result—one sign of progress, at least (one would hope—as opposed to legal corporate DEI virtue-signaling).
Well-known Foster compositions that are not idealized constructions of the South are highly exceptional. The parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” (later covered by Bing Crosby) is a breath of fresh air, with no directly-stated Southern setting. But its title, as one historian points out, conveys the essence of Foster’s Southern idylls: they are all “beautiful dreams,” the dreamer of which never lived in the South and visited it exactly once on his honeymoon. Foster died at the height of the Civil War, in the North, destitute in the Bowery of New York City. “Beautiful Dreamer” was his last published work.
The Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)
In Foster’s dreams the national subconscious comes to life. “The Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)” (1851), is the state song of Florida, despite the fact that Foster never visited Florida, and his brother picked the name “Suwanee” out of an atlas (a Native American name, predictably, like so many American place names, honoring the legacy of our other sacred primitivist fantasy, the Indian). “Suwanee” was simply the opportune name of an unknown Florida river—a subject Foster was trying to rhapsodize—a name with a rhythmic cadence that happened to suit his song.
The lyrics of Florida’s state song were updated in 2008, but they still convey the essential nostalgia for plantation life found in the original.
The song is sung from the perspective and in the dialect of a slave longing for his family and home, Foster’s vicarious imagining of what it was like to be African American in 1851. In spite of the—from a millennial perspective—cringe-inducing dialect, the chorus betrays Foster’s rhetorical, if not actual, sympathy for a slave through the pathos in his first-person speaker’s longing:
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb-rywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
Foster apparently tapped a wellspring of true emotion in his speaker’s longing for home (probably from personal experience—Foster lost his family home at a young age after his derelict father ran into financial trouble).
Sincere emotion, coupled with what could certainly be regarded as a grotesque parody of African American speech, by today’s standards. And the assumption that a slave would actually be longing for his former slave plantation—but who’s to say?
In other Foster compositions, including perhaps “The Old Folks at Home,” the slave’s longing is connected to the fact that the black speaker has been separated from his family on the plantation, after being “sold down the river” to another.
Offering a panAfricanist interpretation, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois said that the singer’s nostalgia in “The Old Folks at Home” represents a longing for the people and traditions of Africa, by Americans of African origin.
In 1957, Ray Charles had his first hit with a version “The Old Folks at Home,” renamed “Swanee River Rock (Talkin’ Bout that River).”
In “The Old Folks at Home,” already, we can intuit the essential best-and-worst dualism of rock & roll: raw and ridiculous, tragic-comedy (“comedy” because the song was adopted by minstrel theater), pathos and bathos, emotion concealed in grotesque primitive form, with race-imitating lyricism:
Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.
Here Foster, as some claim, may be expressing his childhood longing for a lost home through the yen of a fictional slave. It’s a sympathetic exercise, in that the songwriter had to at least imagine what the longing of a slave might feel like, if only to channel that imaginary longing through his own personal experience.
The longing in “Swanee River” has a literary element to it as well. The yen for home is as old as Homer’s Odyssey, with its hero Odysseus longing to return home to Ithaca—by sea instead of “Swanee.” It’s how Bob Dylan self-mythologized his career in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home—as a musical journey:
I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.
It’s the story of the mythical original musician, Orpheus, on his journey back from hell, who made the mistake of looking back at his lover Eurydice, and losing her forever—also reflected in the name of another Dylan documentary, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back.
Orpheus too floated downriver from home—after he was torn to pieces by Dionysian women.
It’s the story of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, after the fall of Troy: wandering the Mediterranean like Odysseus, longing for his lost Trojan home, and finding a new one in Italy. Along the way, like Orpheus, he too went to hell and back, descending and returning from Hades, before Aeneas eventually settled in Alba Longa and laid the legendary foundations of a new home, along a river—the Tiber, and Rome.
My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!
Foster’s other popular longing-for-home piece is “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” (1853), still recited annually at the opening of the Kentucky Derby.
It was originally entitled “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!” and was probably inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which may have had a profound effect on Foster’s views on slavery. This leads some scholars to suggest that Foster veered towards abolitionism later in life (others disagree), but indeed, after “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!”, Foster began to distance himself from minstrelsy compositions and songs that employed black dialect, moving toward songs like his last, “Beautiful Dreamer.”
“My Old Kentucky Home” was often included in “Tom shows”—theatrical stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as more demeaning racial caricatures in blackface minstrel theater.
Foster wrote these songs, and became the first American songwriter to make a meager living off of sheet music publishing due to new copyright laws and printing technology—but he never performed them. His songs were incorporated into the blackface minstrel tradition, as well as abolitionist theater, but Foster never appeared in blackface himself.
One of the most important abolitionists of the day, self-emancipated slave-cum-intellectual Frederick Douglass, the W.E.B. DuBois and MLK of his time, claimed in his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), that songs of sentimental human longing, including “My Old Kentucky Home,”
…are heart songs, and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. [They] can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.
(The notable exception to Frederick Douglass’ decrial of blackface minstrelsy, which I alluded to in an earlier post.)
Paul Robeson—the American baritone, poet, stage and film actor, professional football player, and civil rights activist—recorded a version of “My Old Kentucky Home” in the 1920s.
Another major figure in the early-twentieth-century struggle for civil rights, contralto singer Marian Anderson—the first black woman to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, who in a monumental victory against segregation, sang to an integrated crowd of 75,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and millions more on the radio, at the behest of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt on Easter Sunday 1939, released a version of the song in Japan.
Louis Armstrong recorded a New Orleans jazz interpretation, and Gene Krupa a swing version. Judy Garland performed it several times, once at a Kentucky Derby event. Bing Crosby sang it, as did Al Jolson—the Jewish singer, actor, and vaudevillian who played the lead in the first non-silent, “talkie” motion picture—in blackface, in the Warner Brothers film The Jazz Singer (1927).
To say the least, “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” has a complicated history. Good and bad, poison and cure, a musical pharmakon.
But its impact exceeds popular music.
The original title for Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936) was taken from one of the song’s lyrics—"Tote the Weary Load.” Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Buttler sing the song in the novel, and in the 1939 film version, simple-minded housemaid caricature “Prissy” sings a line from “My Old Kentucky Home”—"a few more days for to tote the weary load.” The actress who played “Prissy,” Butterfly McQueen, was not allowed to attend the film premiere for whites-only—an insult that novelist Margaret Mitchell, very belatedly, realized was ethically unforgivable.
Bugs Bunny played the opening bars of “My Old Kentucky Home” in a 1953 Warner Brothers cartoon, “Southern Fried Rabbit”—on a banjo, disguised in blackface to fool Yosemite Sam.
(There’s a distinct continuity between blackface minstrel “comedy” and early animation, which I may explore in a later post—one early minstrel performance, titled something like “Those Looney, Cooney Tunes,” suggests that the name of the popular cartoon series, whose early shorts are rife with racial caricatures, may have been partially-derived from minstrelsy.)
In Mad Men, Roger Sterling performs the “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface for his ad agency’s Kentucky Derby party, in an episode titled after the song. It also appears in a Simpsons episode, “The Color Yellow.”
Randy Newman, whom Greil Marcus has described as essentially singing in a benign form of modern blackface, incorporated part of the song into the chorus of his mid-1960s tune “Turpentine and Dandelion Wine.”
Johnny Cash released it as a single on his 1975 Columbia album, John R. Cash, the only modern version of “My Old Kentucky Home” to make the Top 100, at number 42 on the Billboard country-music charts.
In 2015, Don Henley told the L.A. Times that the music of the Eagles was partially-inspired by Stephen Foster:
My grandmother lived with us. She sat in a rocking chair every day, singing hymns and Stephen Foster songs: “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River” and “The Old Folks At Home,” and all those very American things. That’s probably where I got “Desperado.” If you listen to that melody and those chords ... Billy Joel said to me the minute he heard it, “That’s Stephen Foster!” I said, “OK, fine!”
In a 1996 tribute to native Kentuckian and author of “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” Johnny Depp, Lyle Lovett and Warren Zevon covered “My Old Kentucky Home” in honor of Hunter S. Thompson. The song was reprised when Thompson’s ashes were blasted from a canon at his funeral in 2005.
For better and worse, Foster’s song has become one of the main choruses in American popular culture—“black” and “white”—in music, film, animation, novels and journalism.
While the song is about a man lamenting the loss of his family and being sold down the river into further enslavement, with the hindsight of history, Foster’s lyrics seem to assume the air of prophecy, as songs so often do.
Before each titular refrain in the verses of “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” Foster’s black speaker, in retrospect, seems to ominously predict the beginning of the Civil War, still eight years off.
“By ’n by hard times comes a-knocking at the door” (Good-Night!), because the “time has come when the darkies have to part” (Good-Night!), so there’s only “A few more days till we totter on the road / Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!”
In this historically-revised interpretation (my own), the old Kentucky home is plantation slavery, and “Good-Night!” is impending social revolution, the end of the Confederacy to come—the “night they tore ol’ Dixie down,” as the Band would sing in The Last Waltz, six score and three years later.
The first verse of Foster’s “Old Kentucky Home” plowed what would prove to be fertile ground, planting the seeds not only of Frederick Douglass’ “sympathy for the slave,” but also for the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (another ode to Africanist primitivism).
Mick Jagger attributed the power of “Sympathy for the Devil” to its samba rhythm, which, he said:
has an undercurrent of being primitive—because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
Long before Mick Jagger was imitating “Afro-whatever-you-call-that” rhythms in 1968, George Gershwin was imitating African American spirituals in 1935, and in a way, the African American imitations of Stephen Foster from 1853.
The first verse of Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” is remarkably similar to George Gershwin’s “Summertime” aria from Porgy and Bess—the Jewish composer’s imitation of African American spirituals, taken up by scores of jazz, blues, and rock singers on both sides of the color line, from Ella Fitzgerald to Janis Joplin and Sublime.
Foster (“Old Kentucky Home”):
The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home
’Tis summer, the darkies are gay
The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom
While the birds make music all day.
Gershwin (“Summertime”):
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high….
One of these days, you’re going to rise up singing
And you’ll spread your wings and you’ll take to the sky.
This is in stark contrast to the impending civil explosion that Foster’s lyrics, with the 20-20 hindsight of history, seem to intuitively register, but never utter explicitly, in the joyously dark refrain: “Good-Night!”—to slavery, and good morning to Civil War and emancipation.
The End is coming, but let’s sing… of freedom?
“A few more days, and the trouble all will end,” as Foster’s singer says in the final verse. Followed by the final chorus:
Weep no more, my lady, oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song
For the old Kentucky Home,
For the old Kentucky Home, far away.
Or, as Gershwin wrote, in the years between Emancipation and desegregation:
“One of these days, you’re going to rise up singing. And you’ll spread your wings and you’ll take to the sky.”
I’m indebted to Steve Erickson’s “Songs of the Republic,” in A New Literary History of America, for this observation about the date of Foster’s birth and Jefferson and Adams’ deaths, as well as others.