Chorus: All de world am sad and dreary, Eberywhere I roam; Oh! darkeys, how my heart grows weary, All round de little farm I wandered Den many happy days I squandered, When I was playing wid my brudder, Oh, take me to my kind old mudder! One little hut among de bushes, Still sadly to my memory rushes, No matter where I rove. When will I see de bees a-humming When will I hear de banjo tumming Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) It is too much the fashion among musicians to think of the words of a song as comparatively unimportant. No mistake could be greater; for, as Shakespeare has put it, "Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews." Without the words the air would seem to most of us unsatisfying and pointless. The poem not only gives us the key to the emotion which the music arouses; it also emphasizes it in every possible way. The theme of "Old Folks at Home" is the wanderer's longing for home and home folks. Every line of the poem calls up appropriate pictures of the darkey's home and relatives. Our emotions are attached to persons and things, and it is the part of the poet to picture them while the musician stirs our feelings. Foster's song illustrates perfectly one of Irving Berlin's eight rules for writing popular songs: "The title, which must be simple and easily remembered, must be 'planted' effectively in the song. It must be emphasized, accented again and again, throughout verses and chorus." Foster's songs come nearer to being distinctively American than any others that we possess; but in reality we have none that compare with the best songs of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Foster's are not, strictly speaking, negro songs; for the dialect is imperfect and negroes seldom sing them. The airs, nevertheless, are genuinely melodious and are not the echoes of European music. They are, however, colored by the sentimentality characteristic of much of our music and poetry. “The Old Oaken Bucket" and "A Perfect Day" illustrate this sentimental strain which vitiates many otherwise good songs. Genuine negro folk-song is a very different thing from our parlor and vaudeville songs written in a pseudo-negro dialect. Most of the old negro airs are no longer sung by the negroes themselves, who now unfortunately prefer to sing the latest jazz tunes. Perhaps the best of the old negro camp-meeting songs is "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the melody of which the Bohemian musician Dvorak used in his "New World Symphony." SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin' for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan and what did I see, A band of angels comin' aftah me, |