If there was any doubt in the beginning, the verses that followed made it clear that the narrator was hugely ignorant: Some of the traveler's non-sensical observations might be dismissed as good-natured fun ("It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry the sun so hot I froze to death"), but the broken English in which these lines were sung was meant to suggest that the singer was more simple than clever ("It rain'd all night de day I left"). The song started out with a harmless enough premise-an African American is heading south from Alabama to see his girl in Louisiana. African Americans were portrayed as blustering but ignorant and the death of 500 was turned into a punch line. The song was meant to be performed by a white singer in blackface, a racist parody of African American slaves.Īnd the original lyrics were hugely offensive. The portraits were gross caricatures, rooted in the racism that plagued all parts of the country, and "Oh! Susanna" was typical of the genre. Typically, in one part of the show, a dandified and conniving Black man took center stage in a second part of the show, a dawdling and ignorant plantation slave was featured. In minstrel shows, white performers smeared burnt cork on their faces and spoke, sang, and danced in a buffoonish style believed representative of African Americans. Foster wrote the song for a minstrel show. Yikes, Guysīut a pretty ugly side of America lies behind the song as well. You can't get much more American than that. And to top it off, "Oh! Susanna," perhaps Foster's most frequently sung song, was introduced in an ice cream parlor. Only 21 when he wrote this song, he also wrote the classic ballads "Beautiful Dreamer," "My Old Kentucky Home," and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair." Just as important, he focused his talents on American materials he wrote songs about America's people and geography, even its politics. Foster is considered by many to be America's first great songwriter. These profit-seeking pioneers quickly quadrupled the population of the territory, speeding its admission into the Union as the nation's 31st state.Įven though Stephen Foster wrote "Oh! Susanna" just prior to the discovery of gold in California, the song became both traveling music and an anthem, a good-time tune that expressed the adventuresome spirit of America's gold-seeking Forty-Niners. Roughly 100,000 people raced to the West Coast after the discovery of gold in the California foothills in January 1848. The California Gold Rush was one of the epic events in American history. Within a couple years, gold seekers from every state were singing the song as they headed west to California. In 1847, "Oh! Susanna" made its debut in a Pittsburgh ice cream parlor.
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