Old Folks at Home

The story

"Old Folks at Home", also known as "Swanee River", was commissioned from Stephen Foster in 1851 by E. P. Christy for his minstrel troupe, Christy's Minstrels. Christy also asked to be credited as its author and was named as such on early printings of the sheet music, so Foster gained little directly from its success, though he went on receiving royalties. Foster had written most of the words but could not settle on a river for the opening line. His brother Morrison later recalled that Stephen came into his office in Pittsburgh asking for a good two-syllable name for a Southern river; he turned down the Yazoo and the Pedee, and when the brothers looked at an atlas, Morrison's finger stopped at the Swanee, a small river in Florida flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Foster never saw the Suwannee River or visited Florida, and few people outside Florida then knew it was a real place.

The song was written in the first person, in the voice and dialect of an enslaved African, at a time when slavery was legal in 15 of the states. Its narrator's longing for the old plantation has been criticised as romanticising slavery. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), read the longing for the "old folks at home" otherwise: as a longing for the people and traditions of Africa, where most of those enslaved in the New World had lived free before they were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic in the slave trade. In performance the dialect has long been replaced by standard American English, as at the 1955 Florida Folk Festival, and the racial term in Foster's words has been replaced by others, such as "brothers", "children" or "dear ones".

Antonín Dvořák arranged it for baritone, chorus and orchestra in 1894, and his Humoresque No. 7 of the 1890s is so like it that the two are sometimes played together, as Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper sang them in the film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Early hit recordings ran from Len Spencer (1892) and the Haydn Quartet (1904) to Alma Gluck (1915), and in the 1930s it was revived by Jimmie Lunceford, Bunny Berigan and Bing Crosby. Ray Charles remade it as "Swanee River Rock" in 1957, and the Beach Boys turned it into "South Bay Surfer" in 1963.

In 1935 Florida made it the state song, in place of "Florida, My Florida", and it was traditionally sung at governors' inaugurations, with its words changed over time to give less offence: "brothers" was sung for the racial term at the dedication of the new state capitol in 1978. In 2007 Governor Charlie Crist left it out of his inauguration and used Charles Atkins's "The Florida Song" instead, and a contest led by state senator Tony Hill, state representative Ed Homan and the Florida Music Education Association chose "Florida (Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky)" on 11 January 2008. The legislature adopted that as the state anthem but kept "Old Folks at Home" as the state song, with its original words replaced by a revised version approved by scholars at the Stephen Foster Memorial.

What it says

A song of homesickness: far from home, the singer longs for the Swanee River, the old plantation and the old folks he left there. Written in the voice of an enslaved man for the minstrel stage, it pictures the plantation as a lost happy home, which is why its words have been criticised and rewritten.

The words

These are Foster's words as they were first sung and printed, in the mock dialect of the blackface minstrel stage, put in the mouth of an enslaved man who longs for the plantation. The chorus calls Black people by a racial slur of the time. They are printed as the historical record; Florida sang “brothers” in its place from 1978, and adopted revised words in 2008.