by Steve Szilagyi
Here’s a song you don’t hear much anymore. Old Black Joe. It used to be really popular.
I mean, really popular. Around 100 years ago, Old Black Joe showed up in more songbooks than anything but Star-Spangled Banner. Singers and choirs of all colors warbled it worldwide.
If you simmer down and give it a listen, you’ll know why. The melody is powerful. The lyrics address universal themes of death, home and longing. Sung by the right singer, it can raise the spirit and wring the heart. But as good as it is, Old Black Joe is now “in de cold, cold ground”.
And it would be stupidly ingenuous to ask, Gee, why?
Old Black Joe was written by young, white Stephen Foster and published in 1860.
Foster was a middle-class kid from the Pittsburgh area. His great hope was to write sentimental ballads on the order of those made popular by Irish folk melodist Thomas Moore. But after taking a shot at those (his first published song Open Thy Lattice Love, flopped) he got caught up in the entertainment craze of his generation: the minstrel show.
Minstrelsy was the most outrageous cultural concoction ever cooked up by America’s drunken, sinful, 19th century soul. The formula: blackface, bad jokes and rousing songs. When it came to supplying the latter, Stephen Foster was king.
His first big hit was O, Susanna – a worldwide smash that will live forever. He followed this with a string of hits you probably know: Camptown Races (Doo-Dah); Old Folks at Home (Swanee River) – and a dozen other insanely catchy tunes.
Many of these songs were written in blackface dialect – full of dropped consonants, skewed grammar, “dese” for these, “de”, and “lub” for love – supposedly derived from African American speech, but sounding like no actual human being spoke, ever. Like this verse from O Susanna:
I come from Alabama
Wid my banjo on my knee,
I’m g’wan to Louisiana,
My true lub for to see …
All the time Foster was writing for the minstrel stage, he was also writing the kind of songs he preferred: sentimental parlor ballads. He was super good at this, as you can hear in songs like Ah! May the Red Rose Live Always and Sweetly She Sleeps My Alice Fair – though none made much noise on the charts.
Foster earned about as much money from his minstrel songs as a songwriter could in those pre-copyright days. But for some reason, his name rarely showed up on the sheet music; and he mysteriously gave composer credit for Old Folks at Home to the nation’s top minstrel show promoter, E.P. Christy.
Hmm. Was he ashamed of something?
Turns out Foster himself was disgusted by the typical minstrel show lyrics. He called them “trashy and offensive” in an 1852 letter to Christy, closing with a vow to clean up the whole “Ethiopian” genre and make it more respectable.
And he was as good as his word. Then and there, he dropped the minstrel dialect. He stopped writing songs about happy slaves and banjos in blacked-up baby talk – no small sacrifice since that was his bread and butter.
What caused this change of heart? We can’t say for sure. But 1852 was the year that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin shook the conscience of the nation. We know that Foster read the book, saw it on the stage, and that it infected his imaginative life.
There are a few episodes from the novel that might have hit Foster’s guilt button especially hard. These are the scenes where slave dealers and masters prod their victims to sing and dance and look happy – or suffer terrible consquences. (Stowe adopted these from authentic narratives, like those of Lewis Clark, who tells of a “slave prison” where fiddlers played continuously while the inmates were forced to dance “over and upon the torn off fibers of their hearts”.)
The last of Foster’s early dialect songs – written just before his change of heart – is a doozy of its kind. Ring, Ring de Banjo combines a joyous melody with a highly unlikely lyrical situation: The speaker is a jolly slave who serves a kindly master. In the last verse, the master sets him free. But after roaming a bit, he misses his master so much that he goes running back to him.
Oh yeah, right. You’d almost think Foster was trolling the abolitionists with that kind of stuff. He was certainly no abolitionist himself. His politics were Democratic and anti-abolitionist, although exactly what he personally thought should ultimately happen to slavery is harder to pin down. (Once the Civil War was underway, however, he turned out some stirring pro-Union music.)
At the same time, Foster’s songs were unusual in portraying the enslaved as human beings capable of love, longing and sorrow. No less a figure than Frederick Douglass, in 1855, praised My Old Kentucky Home and other Foster songs: “They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.” More than 100 years later, pioneer jazzman W. C. Handy – who began his career in 19th century minstrel shows – expressed his belief that Foster’s songs – he names Old Black Joe – had “touched Abraham Lincoln’s heart” and encouraged him to abolish slavery.
Between 1852 and 1860, Foster’s fortunes experienced a steep decline. It would seem, from the outside, to be the usual culprits: drink, debt and domestic difficulties. But Foster’s brother Morrison knew better. Years later, he wrote that Foster’s career went down the drain because he “abandoned the type of song he was best equipped to write, the Southern Negro melody.”
By 1860, desperate for cash, the songwriter went back on his vow, and returned to the genre that made him famous. That year, he wrote a new batch of plantation songs, several in dialect, and one most decidedly not. That one was Old Black Joe. It was Foster’s last big hit, selling 10,000 copies right off the bat and staying in print for the next 100 years.
Here’s how it goes:
Gone are the days, when my heart was young and gay. Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away. Gone from this earth, to a better land I know. I hear their gentle voices calling: Old Black Joe.
CHORUS: I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low. I hear those gentle voices calling: Old Black Joe.
Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain? Why do I sigh that my friends come not again? Grieving for forms now departed long ago. I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”
Where are the hearts once so happy and so free? The children so dear that I held upon my knee. Gone to the shore where my soul has longed to go. I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”
The word “old” in a nickname could signal light-hearted affection (like Ol’ Blue Eyes). The name Joe stands in for the national everyman. What causes all the trouble is that stark, unadorned “black”. What are we supposed to make of it? The body of the song provides no clues.
From a literary perspective, Joe’s black is ultimately as deep and impenetrable as the whiteness of Herman Melville’s whale.
Foster died in 1864. But the popularity of his songs – including Old Black Joe – only grew through the end of the century and beyond. Not only the minstrel songs, but his cherished sentimental songs, like Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, Beautiful Dreamer, and Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming. (The latter, though forgotten today, was well-remembered enough in 1930 for Groucho Marx to announce in Animal Crackers: “Signor Ravelli’s first selection will be Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping [sic] with a male chorus.”)
Right up through the 20th century, Old Black Joe was a staple of the parlor, concert hall, and vaudeville. It was recorded by countless singers and choral groups – black and white.
Among the earliest black artists to record it was the bass, Thomas Craig, in 1898, and it was in the repertoire of choirs and African American singing groups ranging from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to the Dixie Hummingbirds.
But by 1914, the newly formed NAACP was pushing back against cultural stereotypes. At a Boston School Committee hearing that year, NAACP attorney Butler R. Wilson objected to children being required to sing songs containing “racial epithets”. A Rev. Montrose W. Thornton specifically named three Foster songs: Old Black Joe, My Old Kentucky Home, and Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground, calling them an “insult to the whole colored race”.
Wilson’s objection seems obvious now. My Old Kentucky Home and Massa both use the term “darky”, which still offends us.
But Old Black Joe is different. Its only suspect word is “black.” That term was considered impolite in 1914. But it’s okay today. Rev. Thornton’s preferred adjective, “colored” is not.
Bass-baritone Paul Robeson recorded Foster’s melody repeatedly. A celebrity athlete, lawyer, movie star and linguist, Robeson was on the leading edge of American racial consciousness. He recorded many of Foster’s minstrel songs in their original dialect; not to mention later “coon” songs like That’s Why Darkies Were Born and De Li’l Pickaninny’s Gone to Sleep.
Interestingly, it was Old Black Joe that seemed to get his goat. He recorded it at least once with its original title and lyrics. Every other time, he changed the title and chorus: from Old Black Joe to Poor Old Joe.
But is a poor, old Joe really an improvement on an old, black Joe? To regard someone as “Poor old so-and-so” is about as patronizing as it comes: sympathy with a side of hauteur.
Old, black Joe is a different creature altogether. Black is the stark fact of his social identity. Take it or leave it. His head may be “bending low,” but his spirit gazes upward. He has loved people and been loved by them, and now they are waiting for him in heaven. The subject isn’t the poverty of his circumstances, but the richness of his emotional life.
By the 1950s, the Civil Rights movement was getting underway; the entertainment business was doing its best to lose the racial stereotypes. Foster’s irresistible melodies did not disappear, but survived as sanitized, sort-of folk songs sung by crew-cut young men in striped shirts.
And Old Black Joe? That was out by 1960. You’d have to be some kind of crazy person to sing that one; a stranger to good taste; someone who didn’t give a damn what anybody thought; an entertainer so far out of the spotlight, he had nothing to lose.
Enter Jerry Lee Lewis.
By 1960, Lewis met all of the above criteria. A few years earlier, he’d been on top of the world with million-selling songs like Great Balls of Fire, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, and Breathless. Born to a share-cropping white family in Ferriday, Louisiana, Lewis actually picked cotton himself as a child. As an adult, he played to packed houses, appeared on Ed Sullivan, and had a sneer that put Elvis’s to shame.
But at the height of his success in 1958, the press discovered that the 22-year-old Lewis was married to his 13-year-old cousin. Overnight, the bookings dried up. Radio stopped playing his records. Rejected by the world, Lewis went back to his mentor, Sam Phillips, and the studio where he’d recorded his first hits: Sun Records in Memphis.
Lewis was no songwriter himself. But he and Phillips rummaged through the whole of American music, looking for the song or style that would revive Lewis’s career. They recorded everything from spirituals and country-western to Tin Pan Alley. One day, Lewis suggested they try Old Black Joe. It was probably something he remembered from his youth.
Lewis rarely played a song straight. He’d whoop it up, shout his own name, and garland it with showy glissandos. But not Old Black Joe. He approached the 100-year-old song with strange respect, giving it a straightforward reading with gospel sincerity.
Of course, being Jerry Lee, he makes it rock, but with a disciplined, understated current. Sam Phillips highlighted the gospel connection by dubbing in a call-and-response chorus.
The record never cracked the Top-100. But it survives as a singular piece of Americana, and if the song were never recorded again, it could not have had a better send-off.
Finally, let’s meet Thomas Pinkston, an African American violinist born in 1901. Pinkston played with former minstrel W. C. Handy’s original band; the Beale Street Frolic Orchestra; and was still active in the jazz world when he was interviewed in 1973 for the book Beale Street: Black and Blue by Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall.
Over the course of his rambling and entertaining comments (full text available on the Edward R. Cook Oral History Collection web site), Pinkston himself brings up the subject of Stephen Foster and Old Black Joe in particular.
“That,” says the jazzman, “is the greatest melody I ever heard in my life.”
(William W. Austin’s Susanna, Jeannie, and the Old Folks at Home: the Songs of Stephen Foster From His Time to Ours [1975], is an outstanding introduction to the composer’s life, and the racial back-and-forth that has been part of American popular music from its inception. The fact about songbooks in the second paragraph is derived from a paper in the journal Music & Letters, published by Oxford University Press, by Esther M. Morgan Ellis: Mediated Community and Participatory Blackface in Gillette Original Community Sing.)
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