Camptown Races

F. D. Benteen published this in February 1850, under the title De Camptown Races or Gwine to Run All Night. Foster was twenty three. Christy's Minstrels carried it to a national audience the same year, and it has never really left circulation since: it is in schoolrooms, in cartoons, at ball games, and in almost every American songbook printed in the last century and a half.

It came off the minstrel stage, and that is the part usually left out. Foster built it for blackface performance, with dialect verses and a chorus that answers the singer back, and the words that were printed with it in 1850 are a caricature. Modern printings quietly swap them for plain English. This page carries no words at all, the same decision the Oh! Susanna page makes for the same reason: the melody is public domain and belongs to everybody, and the original verses are a document of where the song came from that can stay in the archive.

As music it is a lesson in how little a song needs. Sixteen bars, two chords for most of it, and a call and response built into the shape: the singer gets a line, the room gets two syllables back, and the two halves of the verse are the same four bars with a different landing. The chorus is the only place the tune goes anywhere. It opens low, jumps an octave to a held high g, and then walks back down through the C chord to where it started.

The two tunebooks this page follows both write it in D, and the session settings write it in G. G is carried, because that is where a singer puts it and because it lands the whole song in one octave on a mandolin, from the G at the fifth fret of the D course to the g at the third fret of the E course.

On a mandolin the chorus is the work. The first bar of it is a dotted quarter on the low G and then a climb to d, so the pick has to sit still on a long note and then move, and the bar after it is a held g at the top of the tune, which wants tremolo. The last bar before home, A, B, c, then B and two quick A's, is the only run in the song and the only place the little finger is asked to do anything.