Stephen Foster's songs

Stephen Foster's songs have a reputation for enshrining the "happy darkey" image of slavery, and several were adopted by during the Jim Crow days as the official songs of southern states. But this reputation ignores significant aspects of his work. It can take some effort to look at the lyrics with fresh eyes, avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to the use of dialect. I have a collection called A Treasury of Stephen Foster, and in looking through it, I'm struck by the number of songs which refer to the plight of slaves sold away from their homes and families. Ironically, these are often the songs that were adopted by state legislatures; after the Civil War, they were re-interpreted as nostalgia for slavery. But when he wrote these songs, slavery was still a fact; they have to be understood as the songs of relocated slaves, not disappointed free people.

Let's take some examples, like "Angelina Baker":

Early in de morning
Ob a lubly summer day
I as for Angelina,
And dey say, "She's gone away."
I don't know wha to find her,
Cayse I don't know wha she's gone.
She left me here to weep a tear
And beat on de old jawbone.

There's no suggestion that Angelina is dead. She's "gone away." Slaves don't do that of their own volition, so the meaning is clear.

"Old Folks at Home" isn't as explicit, but the most reasonable interpretation is that the singer is a slave who has been taken away from his family:

When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I.
Oh! take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me live and die.

"My Old Kentucky Home" could have come out quite differently from its published version. The book mentions a manuscript sketch:

Oh, good night, good night, good night
 Poor Uncle Tom
Grieve not for your old Kentucky home
 You're bound for a better land
  Old Uncle Tom.

The notes for the song say, "It is entirely possible that Stephen planned to write a topical song based on Uncle Tom's Cabin but thought better of it because his family were all Democrats and had no use for Abolitionists."

Foster wasn't consistent. In "Ring de banjo," Foster has a freed slave declare his love for "massa" and say, "I'll go away no more." "Massa's in de Cold Ground," a song of slaves mourning for their master, is very hard to take. He wasn't an abolitionist, even though he wrote music to the abolitionist "We Are Coming, Father Abraam" once the Civil War had started. My impression is that Foster never held an opinion that was really his own, but his human sympathies didn't stop at racial lines. Certainly there is a positive, sympathetic side to his songs that shouldn't be ignored.