On the utterly fictional, vaguely uncomfortable, and unquestionably
compelling homes created by the father of American music.
I’m not sure how many 21st century Americans know his name, but
I’d guarantee that most of us can still sing (or at least hum) along to one or
more of the melodies composed by Stephen Foster
(1826-1864). Maybe the silly but mournful “Oh! Susanna”
remains the most popular; perhaps it’s the upbeat excitement of “Camptown Races”; or
the tender, idealized love of “Beautiful Dreamer.”
It’s likely in any case that the specific contexts for these tunes have been
almost entirely lost; I doubt many who sing the first two, for example, know that
they began as minstrel songs, with their lyrics written in the dialect of
African American slaves in the antebellum era (or at least Foster’s
approximation of the same). And that same two-sided point, popularity on the
one hand yet complex and uncomfortable contexts on the other, extends doubly to
Foster’s two most formally sanctioned songs: “Old Folks at Home”
and “My Old Kentucky
Home, Good Night.”
I call those two songs formally sanctioned because each is still, more than
150 years after its composition, an official state song: “Old Folks,” with its
nostalgic embrace of life upon Florida’s “Sewanee river,” has been Florida’s official state
song since 1935; while “Kentucky,” obviously, serves as that state’s official state
song. I call their contexts complex and uncomfortable partly because both
were also composed as minstrel songs in slave dialect, with lyrics that have
had to be revised in recent years in order to ameliorate controversy and
protest: the African American speaker of “Old Folks” finds himself “still
longing for de old plantation”; while the second line of “Kentucky” establishes
our setting as “summer, [when] the darkies are gay.” But perhaps even more
strange is that the nostalgia of each song is entirely fictional, both in their
specifics and in their overarching preference for Southern life; Foster was
born in Pennsylvania, lived in New York for most of his tragically brief life,
and never set foot in either Kentucky or Florida (he only visited the South
once, on a steamboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans).
In terms of American cultural and literary history, Foster’s nostalgic
embrace of a South he had never known foreshadowed the
local color movement known as the plantation tradition, many of the practitioners
of which were likewise northerners. But I would also say that it’s worth
engaging more broadly with this kind of communal, created nostalgia: a constructed
yet still compelling embrace of homes that never actually existed yet that
exercise a significant hold on our national imagination nonetheless. How much
of what we mean by “America,” in our narratives and images and popular usage,
depends on a similar kind of communal, created nostalgia? And while partly that
idea can be a divisive one—connected for example to what the
Tea Partiers mean by “I want my country back”—I believe that it’s also a
unifying and shared concept, and that even recent immigrants can and do often embrace
this kind of constructed image of our communal “home.” There’s nothing
necessarily wrong that—not if it can help create a unified national community—but
at the very least, it’s worth asking what about such constructed images of home
appeals to us so much; wondering why, that is, we still sing along to those
songs.
Next home connections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of
home in America you’d highlight?
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