Song
The song blends together a variety of musical traditions. The opening line refers to "a banjo on my knee", referring to a musical instrument with African origins, but the song takes its beat from the polka, which had just reached America from Europe. Glenn Weiser suggests the song was influenced by an existing work, "Rose of Alabama" (1846), with which it shares some similarities in lyrical theme and musical structure.
The first two phrases of the melody are based on the major pentatonic scale Play
The lyrics are largely nonsense, as characterized by lines such as "It rain'd all night the day I left, The weather it was dry, The sun so hot I froze to death..." (first verse) and "I shut my eyes to hold my breath..." (second verse). It is one of the few songs by Foster that use the word "nigger" (others are "Old Uncle Ned" and "Oh! Lemuel", both also among Foster's early works), which appears in the second verse ("De lectric fluid magnified, And killed five hundred nigger.").
Read more about this topic: Oh! Susanna
Famous quotes containing the word song:
“Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Song of Solomon 4:16.
“Do you hear the wind? It’s not dying,
It’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust,
The past in each of us....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky—
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)