Fritz Kreisler

In 1851 Stephen Foster offered some songs to E.P. Christy of the Christy Minstrels. On acceptance, he turned to writing some. His sketchbook has the lines "Way down upon the old plantation." Later he wrote "Way down upon de Pedee ribber." He ended that verse "Dere's where de old blacks stay." He scratched out "Pedee" and inserted "Swanee," a two-syllable contraction of the Suwannee, a small river that flows out of the Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp into Florida. (For that reason the tune has become the state song of Florida.) Ultimately he eliminated many of the explicit racial references in the song with his inspired decision to use the phrase "old folks" instead.

Thus the lyrics moved in the direction of nostalgia for these "old folks." In the end the song concerned depression and heartsickness over estrangement from family. (Perhaps it expressed Foster's own feelings--to this time in his life Foster had been close to his own family.) The song has the interesting quality of being performable in a jogging soft-shoe rhythm and as a slow, sad ballad.

It became a huge hit. Foster, however, had given Christy the right to publish it under his own name, that was how it appeared on the title page. Foster's reason for doing this was that while he was proud of his more "artful" songs he was embarrassed by "Ethiopian" (as they were then called) songs designed for blackface acts. To his credit he found the condescension of the genre itself disturbing, and some of the lyrics of these songs downright offensive.

However, the song became universally popular. Slaves in Georgia sang it, and a New York street gang called the "Short Boys" accosted the German soprano Henrietta Sontag (famous for having been selected personally by Beethoven to premiere his Ninth Symphony) and demanded that she sing it. Foster was stung by seeing his song become popular without getting credit for it. He wrote Christy that "by my efforts I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian , instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order." Foster asked Christy to reinstate his name on the song. Christy declined. His name remained on the music until the copyright ran out in 1879. Only then did the name of Foster, then dead for 15 years, appear on the music.