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:
“Thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.”
—Bible: Hebrew Song of Solomon, 7:4.
“In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying up into the air, dancing.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“but you are not deaf,
you pick out
your own song from the uproar
line by line,
and at last throw back
your head and sing it.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)