Missed this first time round.

My interpretation of this song is that the narrator is requesting a return to his place of birth, where his family and old master lived and life was much easier that it is at the time of singing. I've always imagined him as a runaway who has discovered that being 'free' in the north isn't what it cracked up to be and that his master was a lot kinder than those he has now.

It has a lot of parallels with 'Linden Lea'
by William Barnes, the Dorset poet. In it, Barnes laments the time spent in the city, under the rod of 'peevish masters' and rejoices in the fact that he has this other place where he is his own person. That's the major difference between the two songs, but both evoke such a feeling of nostalgia and homesickness for a better, cleaner life.

I know it's romanticising the horror of slavery, but I'm positive that not every white 'Massa' was a sadistic brute and not all slaves beaten daily and starved.

Carry on singing 'massa'... it's a dialect word now, just as many others in this context are. If we were to remove all references to slavery, beating, whipping, subjugation of other peoples, then we might forget the horror of it all and make the mistake of repeating it.

LTS