Camptown Races: A Song History

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Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races" was first published in Baltimore by F. D. Benteen in 1850, under a longer title in minstrel-stage dialect, with words and music credited to S. C. Foster.[1] It was issued as the third number in a series of Foster's Plantation Melodies,[2] and the series' title page billed the songs as sung by the Christy & Campbell Minstrels and the New Orleans Serenaders.[3] The American Battlefield Trust places the publication in February of that year.[4]

Color print of three harness horses racing neck and neck past a judges’ stand, drivers in sulkies behind them

Currier & Ives, Trotting for a Great Stake, chromolithograph after Louis Maurer, c1890 (detail). Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Foster wrote the song for the blackface minstrel stage,[4] and like his other minstrel songs it relied on racist caricatures of African Americans inherited from the genre's earlier repertoire.[5][2] In 1850 Foster sent it, along with another comic song, to Edwin P. Christy, whose troupe helped make it a hit.[5][4] Richard Jackson, a New York Public Library music curator, noted that Foster designed it for a lead singer whose lines the rest of the troupe punctuated before everyone joined in the chorus.[4] The words, written in the caricatured stage dialect of minstrelsy, describe betting on a five-mile horse race.[2][3] A 1947 Pennsylvania state historical marker near Wyalusing records a tradition that the title came from the village of Camptown in Bradford County, perhaps because Foster had lived at nearby Towanda and Athens.[6]

Benteen followed with a guitar arrangement in 1852,[7][4] and the American Battlefield Trust reports that the song's popularity and racy associations led one New Jersey town to drop the name Camptown and become Irvington.[4] The melody went on to an independent life as a dance tune: in America it serves as a square-dance singing call, and in England it has been adapted for North-West Morris dancing.[8] The Traditional Tune Archive also reports that the melody was apparently collected as a sea shanty, "Banks of Sacramento," associated with the 1849 California Gold Rush, though it calls any relationship between the two unclear.[8]

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Sources

  1. HathiTrust Digital Library: catalog record for the 1850 first edition of “Camptown Races”.
  2. Johns Hopkins University, Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: Foster’s Plantation Melodies No. 3 [Camptown Races].
  3. University of Toronto Libraries, Representative Poetry Online: “Camptown Races” (Stephen Foster).
  4. American Battlefield Trust: "Camptown Races".
  5. University of Pittsburgh Library System: "The Life and Music of Stephen Collins Foster".
  6. The Historical Marker Database: "Camptown Races Historical Marker".
  7. University of Pittsburgh Library System: "Foster's Complete Songs".
  8. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Camptown Races (1)".