Old Folks At Home: A Song History

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Stephen Foster wrote both the words and the music of "Old Folks at Home" in Pittsburgh in 1851, for E. P. Christy's New York troupe, Christy's Minstrels.[1] The New York firm of Firth, Pond & Co. entered it for copyright that August,[2] and its first edition, a copy of which survives at the Morgan Library, bills the piece as an "Ethiopian melody" and names Christy, not Foster, as writer and composer.[3] The credit had been sold: Christy paid Foster for the right to be named, seemingly at Foster's own suggestion, though accounts of the price differ, with the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh giving $15 and other sources $5.[2][4][5] Foster kept the royalties, and in May 1852 he asked Christy to undo the arrangement so he could build his own reputation, but Christy's name stayed on the early editions; Foster's appeared on the title page only with the copyright renewal of 1879.[2][5]

1886 photograph of a stern-wheel steamboat on a Florida river lined with moss-hung trees, watched by people on the landing

George Barker, Stern-Wheeler Arriving at Silver Springs, Florida, after an Overnight Run up the St. Johns, Oklawaha, & Silver Rivers, albumen silver print, 1886. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Florida river scene, not the Suwannee; it has no connection to the song.

It was a blackface minstrel song, part of a stage genre that Pitt's Center for American Music describes as trading in "demeaning caricatures rooted in racism and white supremacy."[2] Its narrator, far from home, longs for the plantation of his childhood, and Foster wrote his words in minstrel dialect; the Center adds that in the 1870s through the 1890s the song was delivered condescendingly, exaggerating that dialect further.[1][5][6] The river came late. Foster's first draft named the Pedee, and by his brother Morrison's later account the two of them hunted through an atlas for a two-syllable Southern river before landing on the Suwannee, which the song turns into "Swanee."[2][5] Foster never visited Florida or saw the river itself.[1][7] The song sold in the hundreds of thousands, Antonín Dvořák arranged it and conducted the premiere of his setting in New York in January 1894, and its recordings include versions by Riley Puckett (about 1924) and Fiddlin' John Carson (1927).[1][2][5]

Florida made it the state song in 1935 through House Concurrent Resolution No. 22, introduced by Representative S. P. Robineau of Miami, displacing "Florida, My Florida"; the Center for American Music dates the adoption to May 28 of that year.[7][2] By 2008 the song's references to plantation life and its use of a racial slur had made it controversial, as a newspaper report of that year noted.[8] That year the Legislature passed a bill, approved by the governor on June 30, that kept Foster's song but made a revised text, as adopted by Pitt's Center for American Music, the official version, while naming "Florida, Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky" as a separate state anthem.[9][10]

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Sources

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "The Old Folks at Home".
  2. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music (Stephen Foster song catalog): "Old Folks at Home".
  3. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Old folks at home: Ethiopian melody as sung by Christy's Minstrels" (Firth, Pond & Co., first edition, c1851).
  4. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture (University of Virginia): "Old Folks at Home, Ethiopian Melody".
  5. Traditional Ballad Index: "Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)".
  6. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "Stephen Foster's Lyrics".
  7. Florida Department of State: "State Song".
  8. Valdosta Daily Times: "'Swanee River' may be staying" (April 21, 2008).
  9. The Florida Senate: "SB 1558 (2008): Official State Anthem and Official State Song".
  10. The Florida Senate, Florida Statutes: "15.0327 State song".