LONGING FOR "DE OLD PLANTATION"

    Did you know Florida has a State Song?   It's "Old Folks At Home" and last Sunday we visited the North Florida park dedicated the man, Stephen Foster, who penned it in 1851. 

The park's bell tower belts out Foster songs on the hour.

Most know it as "Suwanee River". Foster never visited Florida or the dark brown waterway he made famous.

    He wrote it to be performed in minstrel shows where white actors in black-face made fun of the millions of enslaved people suffering in southern states.

   In the Stephen Foster State Park's plantation house

we viewed ten dioramas depicting scenes from Foster's mostly-forgotten songs like "Camptown Races", "Old Black Joe", and the one romanticizing slave life that represents our state.

 

Detail: Enslaved people picking cotton.That's the master's house high on the distant hill.

  

   Everyone growing up in South Florida was required to learn it in school. I can almost hear my fourth-grade class belting it out in Foster's version of slave dialect,

Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.

All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.

Chorus
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb-rywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!

 

    But we did perform it as nine-year olds. We didn't know we were singing about missing a life of forced labor.

 

     Florida adopted "Old Folks At Home" in 1935. Now, 87 years later, it's time send it to the junkyard with all the other Confederate statues. 

     We don't need a state song but if the loonies in the legislature insist, let it be  "Margaritaville", "Sunburn Blues", or "God Save Us From Desantis".

 

 

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Note: The state song is sung at every Florida governor's inauguration.  Since '78 they have "cleaned it up" a bit.  "Mudder" is now "mother", "darkies" are "brothers" and "de ol' plantation?  Now the "happy slave" is yearning for his "childhood station"!

Another note: They don't call us "Flori-duh" for nothin'.   

 

 

  

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One more diorama,

 

Some say Foster's "Old Black Joe" gave enslaved people a sense of humanity as "Old Joe" missed his long dead friends and relatives. Too old to pick cotton, the well-dressed Joe probably served his master in the plantation house, seen to the right.

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