Oh! Susanna

A few years ago I found myself at the Seward County Fair in Seward, Neb., and we were in a 4H barn watching a clogging demonstration. To me, clogging is one of those things like eating oysters: You wonder who was the first person to ever do it and you wonder what the hell they were thinking. Anyway, they had several different groups clogging to different songs (including MC Hammer's "You Can't Touch This") and one of the groups clogged to a children's recording of "Oh! Susanna." I sat there listening to it and thought, "That's a really strange tune. What was Foster thinking when he wrote it?" So when I got back home, I looked up the history of the song. For one thing, while we all grew up hearing two verses (actually, they are the song's first and third verses) Foster actually wrote four verses. You rarely hear the other two mainly because Foster -- writing in the vernacular and style of the time -- included terms we would consider inappropriate today. In particular, he used the "n" word in the second verse and the term "darkie" in the fourth verse. In fact, the song's protagonist is African-American. But I was able to remove the offensive words, tweak the lines they were in a bit, and the song worked. I also slowed it down, threw a minor chord in the chorus and repeated the last line of the chorus for emphasis. I think it works, and it is generally the only cover I routinely do.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• david
• hanners
• oh!
• susanna
• stephen
• foster
• folk
• americana
• seward
• nebraska
• clogging
• 4H

[throssellderrick]

Nice guitar shame about the singing

[dhanners23]

@throssellderrick

Yes, indeed, shame about the singing. Just what does that mean, anyway? Your message wasn't really clear.

[iKennyMcCormick]

great, one of the best here on the tube. thx

[hbclark1]

This version brings deserved new life to a shop-worn old standard now usually relegated to 4th-grade music classes.

[cowgirlrides222]

go susana!