Oh! Susanna

Stephen Foster was twenty one and working as a bookkeeper for his brother in Cincinnati when he wrote this. A local quintet sang it at Andrews' Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh on 11 September 1847, and W. C. Peters published it in Cincinnati in 1848. Foster made almost nothing from it. The song was pirated by publisher after publisher before American copyright had any teeth, and the hundred dollars he is usually said to have been paid for it is the whole of what the most popular song in the country earned its author.

Then the Gold Rush picked it up. Wagon trains and ships full of people heading for California in 1849 sang it the whole way, with new words about washing out gold on the Sacramento, and it became the closest thing that migration had to an anthem. It has stayed in circulation ever since, through minstrel troupes, brass bands, schoolrooms and old-time string bands, and there are very few tunes an American room is more certain to already know.

It came out of the minstrel stage, and that is the part usually left out. Foster wrote it for blackface performance, in the dialect those shows used, and the second verse contains a line about the deaths of five hundred Black people that is presented as a joke. It is ugly, and it is one of the reasons this page carries no words at all. The melody is public domain and belongs to everybody. The verses are a document of where the song came from and can stay in the archive.

The tune itself is built for a crowd. Sixteen bars, three chords, and the second half of the verse and the second half of the chorus are the same four bars, so more than a third of the song is one phrase you already know by the time you get to it. The chorus is the only place it changes color, two bars parked on C while the melody sits on a held c and then three e naturals, which is the lift that makes people join in.

On a mandolin the whole song lives between the G at the fifth fret of the D course and the open E course, and the hand stays put. The one thing to get right is the pickup. It is two eighths on G and A landing an eighth before the downbeat, and it comes back four times, so practice starting the song rather than starting the first bar. The other place to slow down is the third beat of the opening bar, a dotted quarter on d falling to an eighth on e, which is the swing the whole song rides on. Give the long note its full length and clip the short one.