Content warning: this post includes offensive imagery.
One of my tasks for the next two weeks is to put together my syllabus for NYU’s new music history class on 20th century American popular music. To start the semester off, I wanted to find a song that spans many styles and eras, and that lays the thematic foundation for what comes after. I decided on “Old Folks At Home” by Stephen Foster, also known as “Swanee River.” This song was written in 1852, but it had a significant presence in the zeitgeist throughout the 20th century, and Secondhand Songs lists a couple dozen of recordings from this century too. It’s Florida’s state song, because of course it is. They did replace the word “darkies” with “brothers” in 1978, though, so that’s nice.
When you look at the cover for the sheet music on Wikipedia, it raises some questions:
First of all, why “Ethiopian melody”? This just means that it’s meant to be sung by a blackface minstrel. And why does it say “written and composed by EP Christy”? Stephen Foster sold the song to Christy, leader of Christy’s Minstrels, for whom it was a massive hit. You can see a recreation of their act in the 1952 film I Dream of Jeanie. It’s incredibly offensive!
Foster’s lyrics are in dialect, and they reference “longing for de old plantation”, “darkeys”, and “de banjo strumming.” It’s part of a whole subgenre of minstrel songs that imagine emancipated slaves yearning for their former lives. These songs were always written by white people. Romanticizing plantation life is a less dominant theme of pop culture now than it was a hundred years ago, but the trope persists right on up to the present.
Here’s the oldest recording I can find of “Old Folks At Home”, by George J Gaskin, variously dated 1896, 1897 or 1899.
Here’s a 1910 recording by Jessie Broughton; you get to see the gramophone in action.
George Gershwin and Irving Caesar based their song “Swanee” on “Old Folks at Home”. Here’s Al Jolson’s 1920 recording.
This was an absolute smash hit: it was number one on the charts for nine weeks, it sold a million copies of the sheet music and two million records, and it put Gershwin on the map as a songwriter. The lyrics are not quite as offensive as Stephen Foster’s, but the theme is the same.
Swanee, how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Swanee
I’d give the world to be among the folks in D-I-X-I-
E-ven though my mammy’s waiting for me, praying for me
Down by the Swanee
The folks up north will see me no more
When I go to that Swanee shore
Why are a couple of Jewish guys from New York nostalgic for the antebellum South? For that matter, why was Stephen Foster nostalgic for it? Foster visited the South exactly once, and never set foot in Florida, where the Suwanee River is located. So what is going on here? What exactly were these guys imagining themselves to be yearning for?
Maybe Gershwin and Caesar were expressing nostalgia for minstrelry itself. The form dominated American entertainment in the mid-19th century, but in the early 20th century, it started getting displaced by vaudeville. (Blackface remained a regular feature of vaudeville and musical theater long after that, though.) The usual explanation for minstrelry’s nostalgia factor is that the antebellum South represents a “simpler time”, but simpler for whom? I think we can answer that for ourselves.
I was surprised to learn that many black artists performed and recorded both “Old Folks At Home” and “Swanee.” The reasons for that are complicated! From 1923, here’s Eubie Blake’s “Fantasy On Stephen Foster’s Swanee River.”
Blake is signifyin(g) on the song, using what he probably considered to be a hokey cornball tune as a way to show off his virtuosity. You can practically see the air quotes around Foster’s melody.
Paul Robeson recorded “Old Folks at Home” in 1930, with Foster’s lyrics mostly intact, but without dialect, so “the” instead of “de”. Robeson hadn’t yet had his full activist awakening by this point, but he did imbue the song with significantly more dignity than it deserved.
Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers recorded the tune in 1937. They sang the lyrics in dialect, presumably shrugging their shoulders and figuring that a gig’s a gig. The performance makes me uncomfortable, but the musicianship is superb.
Ray Charles had his first hit in 1957 with a radical rewrite of “Old Folks At Home”, very much in the spirit of Eubie Blake. He took out all the dialect and plantation references.
This is much more palatable to me than Armstrong and the Mills brothers, but in fairness, back in the 1930s they were operating in a world where most white people were still perfectly comfortable with blackface. White supremacy was well within the political mainstream at the time. Here’s Al Jolson doing “Old Folks At Home” in character as EP Christy in the 1939 film Swanee River.
He also played himself in the 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue, and sang “Swanee” in blackface. This was within my parents’ lifetime.
Judy Garland, who had an unfortunate history of doing blackface herself, didn’t wear it in her performance of “Swanee” in A Star Is Born (1954), but several members of the ensemble cast did.
Not every white person was quite this racist back then. Pete Seeger recorded “Old Folks At Home” under the title “Swanee River” in 1959, and, good liberal that he was, he didn’t use dialect, and he replaced “darkies” with “brothers”. Otherwise, though, he kept the song intact, and his version has not aged as well as Ray Charles’.
Brian Wilson adored Stephen Foster, and adapted his songs repeatedly. In 1963, Wilson wrote “Surfin’ Down the Swanee River” for The Honeys, featuring his future wife Marilyn Rovell, and also sang backup on it. I don’t even know how to think about the racial politics here; it’s one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard.
Aretha Franklin recorded “Swanee” on one of her many standards albums in 1966. It is not the kind of thing we remember her for! It’s wild to think that it was only a year before she recorded “Respect.” Andrew Hickey points out that Aretha loved this kind of tune, and was probably not under any presssure from the label or producer to record it.
The Temptations performed “Swanee” on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967, and they put it on a live album the following year. As with Aretha, this is very far from the kind of material we associate them with now. I’m assuming they approached it as a regular old Gershwin standard, and that it didn’t have strong minstrel connotations by that point.
People are still recording “Swanee” in the 21st century. Here’s Rufus Wainright’s version from 2007.
Like I said above, plenty of people still record “Old Folks At Home” too. Here’s a live performance by Hugh Laurie (Dr House himself) in 2012.
The first unit of my class is going to be Minstrelry and Black Identity. I didn’t choose the topic, but I fully support starting with it. We need to study minstrelry not only for its massive importance in American cultural history, but also for its continuing relevance. Some scholars argue, convincingly, that minstrelry never ended, it just became slightly more subtle. Matthew Morrison’s book Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States defines “Blacksound” as “the sonic complement and legacy of blackface performance… a performance practice (in sound and movement) that laid the foundation for the industry of American popular music and entertainment within the context of chattel slavery” (pp. 8-9). Morrison identifies Blacksound as the throughline running through American pop culture from the early 19th century through the present. I believe him; I don’t think it would even be possible for a white artist to attain mainstream pop success without adopting Blacksound.
It’s easy to condemn white racists 100 years ago for wearing or enjoying blackface, but why did they do it in the first place? The obvious answer is that it demeaned black people, but Morrison doesn’t think that’s the only factor. He also points out that minstrelry was a liberating experience for white performers and audiences, a way to create their ideals of themselves in contrast to their caricatures of blackness. He further argues that this experience retains its attraction in the present.
The cultivation of minstrelized performances through the ruse of blackness, as well as varied and counterfeit interpretations of sounds produced by black people via blackface, allowed white participants to be, as Nina Eidsheim states, “liberated to explore the heightened expressivity of the rest of the body and the voice.” The paradoxical ritual of blackface performance—i.e., the impersonation of black movement and sound through non-black and often racist interpretations, while co- constructing idea(l)s of whiteness through popular sound—persisted after the disappearance or removal of burnt cork. To attend to the sounds and performances of blackface, and not just its visual mask, elucidates how the ritualistic improvisation of hybrid scripts in sound and movement allowed Blacksound to liberate both the minds and bodies of (white) performers and audiences alike, while simultaneously being absorbed as sources of property within the economy of popular entertainment. Attending to sound also foregrounds the way in which the embodiment of blackface performances and scripts continues, whether blackface is present or not, within American popular music (p. 13).
This is an uncomfortable paragraph for me to read, because it very accurately describes my own musical life. I have felt my own inner self much more truly expressed and reflected back to me through black music than through the music of my white ancestors. When I hear blues or jazz or funk or hip-hop, I hear something that speaks to me profoundly. That is… not great.
Morrison devotes most of his book to a study of intellectual property law, which has enabled white artists and businesspeople to profit from black cultural expression in ways that have largely excluded the originators of that expression.
Because sound and movement were largely left out of copyright protection for most of the nineteenth (and well into the twentieth) century, the very sounds that originated in localized black communities (i.e., the blues scale that developed out of harmonic practices derived from black spiritual music, as well as idiosyncratic rhythmic practices and vocal stylings in work songs and other black folk music) have been ontologically understood as part of the public domain since slavery (p. 15).
He also points out that even when a black artist like Ray Charles reclaims a song like “Old Folks At Home” through signifyin(g), white listeners can easily miss the point.
If the black performers—who eventually gained access to the popular stage over the course of the nineteenth century—were Signifyin(g) upon the pre-established, racist tropes of blackface and attempted to “change the joke, slip the yoke” in their performances, the majority-white audiences still often received and accepted their performances as “authentic” representations of black people and other people of color. Their own white bodies were liberated through participation, yet these same acts were treated as degrading and negative scripts when emanating from (and written onto) actual black and other non-white people (p. 18).
So, that’s how I plan to kick off the semester. It’s going to be uncomfortable for everyone! At the ISME Conference last week, I went to a session by Shoshana Gottesman-Solomon and Robin Freeman about designing classes to have a constructive atmosphere for hard conversations like this one. I usually take a loose, off-the-cuff approach to class discussions, but for a topic like blackface, I want to be more intentional about taking care of the students and myself. Gottesman-Solomon and Freeman have some useful ideas about that. They recommend that you design an opening activity that builds trust and psychological safety and signals the kind of participation you want to invite. The goal is to cultivate joy and connection, or, for me, at least to mitigate anger and hurt feelings.
Gottesman-Solomon and Freeman also recommend that the class work together to create a community agreement, asking the students what would allow them to learn, contribute, and make mistakes in the group. Some elements might include:
- Approach each other and our differences with kindness, curiosity, and self-awareness
- Lean into discomfort
- What’s said here stays, what’s learned here can leave
Finally, Gottesman-Solomon and Freeman recommend building in systems for students to give you continual feedback, using tools like Stephen Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ). I have never used these kinds of formalisms before, trusting my natural warmth to build trust and connection with students. It has worked fine so far, but I haven’t stress-tested it very hard, and talking about blackface is going to be a serious stress-test, especially right at the beginning of the class. So this is going to require me to step up my pedagogical game.