Oh! Susanna

The story

Stephen Foster wrote "Oh! Susanna" in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1846. A local quintet first sang it at a concert in Andrews' Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 11 September 1847, and W. C. Peters & Co. of Cincinnati published it in 1848. Minstrel troupes made it a great success. As was common then, many people registered it for copyright under their own names, and it was copyrighted and published at least twenty-one times between 25 February 1848 and 14 February 1851. Foster was paid only $100 for it, but at a time when no American song had sold more than 5,000 copies of sheet music, "Oh! Susanna" sold over 100,000. Its success led the publishers Firth, Pond & Company to offer him two cents for every copy sold, and he became the first fully professional songwriter in the United States.

The song mixes several traditions. Its first line names a banjo, but its beat comes from the polka, newly arrived in the United States from Europe, and the first two phrases of its melody use the major pentatonic scale. The writer and musician Glenn Weiser has suggested that Foster drew on two songs published in 1846: the melody of the verse resembles Billy Whitlock's "Mary Blane", the opening of the chorus is almost the same as that of Silas S. Steele's "Rose of Alabama", and both "Oh! Susanna" and Steele's song tell of a lover travelling from one Deep Southern state to another with his banjo in search of his sweetheart.

The original words were openly racist. Written for the minstrel stage, they were sung by an African American narrator and depicted Black people as dim-witted, and the second verse used a racial slur, as did Foster's early songs "Old Uncle Ned" and "Oh! Lemuel". Once those verses were dropped, the contradictory lines left behind came to be described as nonsense. The song became the unofficial theme of the Forty-Niners, the gold seekers bound for California, who sang new words about travelling to California with a washpan on their knee in place of the banjo. A traditional Pennsylvania Dutch version keeps Foster's melody with entirely new words.

It remains one of Foster's and America's best-known songs, and in 2010 the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the top 100 Western songs of all time. Harry C. Browne recorded it with the original words in 1916, and Dan Hornsby recorded it for Columbia Records in the 1920s. Later versions range from the Singing Dogs' novelty record of 1955 and Bing Crosby's medley (1961) to the Byrds (1965) and James Taylor (1970). In 1963 the Big 3 recorded Tim Rose's "The Banjo Song", which set Foster's words to a new melody; that melody was reused for Shocking Blue's hit "Venus" (1969), and Neil Young and Crazy Horse covered Rose's version in 2012.

What it says

A comic travelling song: a singer sets off across the South with his banjo to find his sweetheart, Susanna, and tells of his journey in a string of absurd, contradictory images. The tune takes its beat from the polka. Its original verses, written for the minstrel stage, mocked Black people; the song as sung today leaves them out.

The words

These are the words of an 1848 edition, in the mock dialect of the blackface minstrel stage. The second verse jokes about killing Black people with a racial slur of the time. They are printed as the historical record; the verses were later dropped, and the song is now sung with the chorus and the first verse alone. This edition prints its first verse only under the music, so it is not given here.