From DDOO-DAH! Stephen Foster's biographer confronts racism found in local composer's songs (University [of Pittsburgh] Times, VOLUME 29 NUMBER 18 MAY 15, 1997):

Fewer than 20 of Foster's nearly 200 songs fall in the blackface category. According to Emerson, Foster himself became increasingly uneasy about his blackface songs and eventually abandoned the style. But the image of the Pittsburgh songwriter as a racist endures in some people's eyes because a disproportionate number of those songs have survived.

Among Foster's most racist blackface songs is none other than "Oh! Susanna." Few people are aware of that today, however, because the song's second verse, with its flippant comment on 500 "Nigga" being killed in a riverboat explosion, is so horrible that it has seldom been sung in the 20th century, according to Emerson.

Other famous Foster songs that have offended and humiliated countless African Americans include "Old Black Joe," "Old Folks at Home" and "My Old Kentucky Home." As recently as last fall, Emerson noted, two black members of the Yale Glee Club threatened to quit if the group sang "My Old Kentucky Home." The club's president burned a copy of the music, a majority of its members voted not to perform the song and the program was changed.

Yet, Emerson pointed out, there is a paradox at work in such stands because some of the most prominent figures in African American history have singled Foster out for high praise.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass believed "My Old Kentucky Home," awakened "sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish." W. E. B. Du Bois, a founding father of the National Association for the Advancement of Color ed People, extolled "Old Black Joe" and "Old Folks at Home" (better known as "Swanee River") and insisted that they were not "debasements and imitations." W. C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," wrote that "the well of sorrow from which Negro music is drawn is also a well of mystery. I suspect that Stephen Foster owed something to this well, this mystery, this sorrow. 'My Old Kentucky Home' makes you think so, at any rate. Something there suggests close acquaintance with my people." Such paradoxes, Emerson believes, lie at the heart of rock 'n' roll and have characterized American popular music from the very beginning in the 1830s. "When Davy Crockett, the coonskin Congressman, visited the jumpin'est joint in New York City," Emerson said, "the fiddling and dancing and drinking in that dive mixed 'black and white, white and black, all hug-'em-snug together.'" Although music and dance began to bring blacks and whites into somewhat closer contact during Foster's time, Emerson said he does not mean that "everything was hunky-dory." In fact, he found in his research that appropriating, imitating and mocking black styles of singing and dancing was a way of asserting white supremacy.