Song of the Day 5/3: Johnny Cash, “Camptown Races”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

The Kentucky Derby is Saturday. Somebody will bet on the bay.

Doo Dah.

The singer in Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” did not bet on the bay. He blew his money on the bob-tail nag.

This was the first widely popular American horse racing song. That’s fitting, since Foster was pretty much the father of American popular music and the first to make a living as a songwriter.

“”Oh, Susanna” is his. So are “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Folks at Home” (aka “ Swanee River”), “Hard Times Come Again No More” and others we seem to be born knowing like there’s some kind of Stephen Foster gene.

You can hear another Foster song, “My Old Kentucky Home,” if you tune in to the Derby Saturday. It’s played before every edition of the race. It’s not really a horse racing song but a hymn to the bluegrass country where Foster grew up rolling on the little cabin floor. That’s a lie. He never lived in Kentucky or anywhere in the South, but the idea of it gave him a warm feeling.

A songwriter in the 1850s depended on blackface minstrel shows for commercial success, and that’s where Foster sent his. It’s unthinkable now, but then it was the place where “hits” were created. “Camptown Races” was his second big one after “Oh Susanna.” In this period Foster mostly wrote lively, comic songs about blacks before shifting to sentimental ballads about them.

“Camptown Races” is about horse racing at “camps” where itinerant free blacks lived when moving from job to job. The tale has been told by everybody from Liberace to Foghorn Leghorn to the white trash in “Blazing Saddles.” It has been quoted by classical composers. This snappy version by Johnny Cash is pretty fantastic despite a bit of country hokum, and don’t miss the mischievous look in Cash’s eyes.

Songs like “Camptown Races” were obviously demeaning or at least condescending to the black folks they were written about, but Foster used a light hand compared to others. “Camptown Races” gets its humor largely from the black dialect, or what passed for that among white writers. Much of that has been “cleaned up” in modern versions. Basically, Foster saw blacks as simple but good-hearted.

Whatever else they did, these minstrel songs humanized blacks in a certain way. They were filled with details of their lives, avoiding the high-minded abstractions of the prim parlor music of the time. In kind of a twisted way they were written from the blacks’ point of view and so allowed them a form of expression. Eventually blacks themselves were performing in minstrel shows.

“My Old Kentucky Home” was one of the later “plantation ballads” and was considered sympathetic to blacks. It was influenced by the abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Though later seen as, well, an “Uncle Tom,” this Tom was a positive character who had been sold by his relatively lenient but impoverished owner and winds up in the Deep South where slavery was particularly cruel. He missed his old Kentucky home.

Frederick Douglass wrote that the song “awakens sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.”

Here’s a nice contemporary version by John Prine, who, like his contemporaries, substitutes “old folks” for the “D” word.

And here’s one by the great Paul Robeson, who didn’t.