Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

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	14	OUR FAMILIAR SONGS. MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME.

	This song is the twentieth of Stephen C. Foster's "Plantation Melodies." 1 do Dot know that it is true, but I cannot help feeling that it was the intrinsic beauty and merit of these songs that lifted the Christy Minstrels from the low position usually occupied by such troupes to something like that of a respectable concert-room, both in this country and in England. Foster caught his idea of writing his, so-called, negro melodies from listening to the absurdities then in vogue with the burnt-cork gentry. He walked home from one of their concerts in Baltimore, with the banjo strains ringing iu his ears, and before he slept he had composed the ridiculous words and taking air called "Camptowu Races," with its chorus of " Du-da, du-da, da." He passed from one finer tone to another, until lie reached the perfection of simple pathos in "Old Folks at Home," "Massa's in the cold, cold ground," " 0, Boys, carry me 'long," and " My Old Kentucky Home." The music is hi& own.