Come All You Blackface Freaks and Hillwilliams: 200 Years of Roots-Rock Revival (A Memoir)

1. Longing for Home

When I was in grade school, cheerful young women led us in song. “All the world is sad and dreary,” we sang, and “gone are the days,” and “my heart is bending low.” What doleful lyrics for kids to sing. And yet what catchy, haunting melodies.

The music and lyrics are by Stephen Foster, the best-known American pop composer of the nineteenth century, who achieved great longevity. A century after his death, I knew his songs by heart. Yet it’s not Foster’s long survival, or even his Victorian melancholy, that startles my memory now. It’s his most enduring theme: a supposedly unquenchable longing, of black people, for a home in slavery.

I was born after Brown v. Board of Education. When the first 1960’s Civil Rights Act was signed, I was entering the fourth grade, in New York City, and the Beatles were touring North America. Yet as a white child of that time and place, I sang those songs.

[NOTE: The following contains some examples of offensive terminology, quoted without expurgation from the sources described, including but not limited to two instances of the “n” word.]