Who Shall Rule This American Nation?

Actually, Stephen Foster was a die-hard abolitionist. In light of that, jmgorman, perhaps a song about an accident killing hundreds of blacks might be viewed in a different way, even if it's come down to us with all the meaning stripped out of the verses.

Mark Twain used "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn, too; it was the argot of the time. Just to add to kyrademon's post: Count me among those who don't care whether things help or hurt black people.

The entire concept of beating one's breast over the fate of black people may be the most boring thing a person can do. Black people can take care of themselves.

So, all you self-appointed "friends of black people," take a hike. And, for your information, the modern blues business as born in what was called "race records" in the teens and s. And, yes, having a place to perform and make money beats having no place to perform and no place to make money.

2 best Califorf Jackson tracks

Looking at the past from the vantage point of a spoiled modern kid is an exercise in lunacy. It's a bit more complex than that: Shouting is the new bad commie, is he not? MeTa posted by trey at 8: I wonder if Shouting will ever realize the fundamental irony of repeatedly posting to metafilter about how no one cares about the opinions of people posting to metafilter.

Cause, yeah, god forbid we have any discussion of black people in a thread about the life work of one of the most important abolitionists of the nineteenth century, whose political opinions were written into songs that were still sung today, but whose lyrics and practices can nonetheless still sometimes sound racist to modern ears since he was a product of his time. That should really have been on MeTa, and I will take the rest of it there. Thanks for the links, y2karl. Basically, American pop culture is deeply rooted in American racial history, and the interaction between whites playing blacks and blacks playing whites.

• Who shall rule this American nation? Work would ask again.
• Who Shall Rule This American Nation? - Poem by Henry Clay Work.
• Who shall rule this American nation? | PICRYL;
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Tosches sees minstrel shows as "America's first indigenous theatrical form. Just by the by, if perchance my wording was a tad misleading, I was trying to say that Foster himself had a humanitarian outlook in the way he viewed and portrayed blacks. That phrase wasn't meant to imply that this attitude is the overall 'minstrel theme' or the like.

I had perused parts of y2karl's wonderful posts I nearly linked them singly as he has done, but there are a few others backgrounding this topic in that link but I hadn't really gone into the minstrelsy background very much when I was reading before making this post. However I did see more than just a few comments vouching for Foster's progressive attitude for the time towards blacks, as is reflected in the FPP links.

But there is much more to Foster than the minstrel tunes. His ballads are his best stuff. I want "Beautiful Dreamer" played at my funeral the scene in Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married" where the girl is played back into the future by a gauntlet of fez-wearing men playing "Beautiful Dreamer" on mandolins, is one of my favorite moments in cinema.

What a sordid death he had.

Famous Poems

Stephen Foster is one of the few things that matters in this world. Him, and Henry Clay Work. Okay, and George F. Oh yeah, and forget that "tribute album" called "Beautiful Dreamer," from a few years back, where they got a bunch of washed up hippies who didn't know Stephen Foster from Eminem to do half-baked versions of what I had always considered indestructable songs.

It is a cheerful marching song and has since been pressed into service many times, including by Princeton University as a football fight song. An unhappy marriage seems to have affected his postwar output.

A massive hit was " My Grandfather's Clock ", published in , which was introduced by Sam Lucas in Hartford, Connecticut , and again secured more than a million sales of the sheet music, along with popularizing the phrase "grandfather clock" to describe a longcase clock. By Work was living in New York City , giving his occupation as a musician.

He was survived by his wife, Sarah Parker Work, and one of their four children. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Eleventh Edition , Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, , "grandfather clock. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource. This page was last edited on 10 October , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.