Talk:Camptown Races
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[edit] Original
The University of Pittsburgh has an extensive on-line archive of Stephen Foster related materials, as he was a native of Pittsburgh.
[edit] Copyvio?
content removed, as it was based on a mistake.
[edit] Rising Sun Newsletter
There's an interesting explanation given for this song, in the Rising Sun Newsletter, which appeared in the bottom-outside-corner of the recto pages in The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1981) on p.133 & 135. I'm not sure how to work it in, or whether it's too large to quote in full(?), so I'll leave it here for now. --Quiddity 22:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
July 28, 1964
Aside from the songs Amanda makes up, she explains them a lot. Take Camptown Ladies which goes, "Camptown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah, Camptown races five miles long, o doo dah day. Gwana run all night, gwana run all day, bet my money on a bob tail nag, somebody bet on the bay." Amanda played the tune over and over on the piano and told us that the Camptown Ladies were radical abolitionists and all around right thinkers and wierdos and they thought their husbands were not nice people for making money off of slavery and gambling. The ladies encouraged the men to go to the track all they wanted because then the ladies had free, unobserved time to help slaves escape and collect anti-slavery petitions to send to congress and whenever their husbands would ask what they did all day they would say, "O honey, I swept the rug and burped the babes and gossiped with the girls," or to put it another way, (and she'd be at the right point in her piano playing) "Doodah, doodah, " and whenever their husbands would wonder how so many slaves were being able to escape, they'd just say they were simple homebodies and didn't understand such matters, "O doo dah day," and then she asked us all what we'd say if we were trying to change things and somebody asked us what we were doing, and we all sang "Doo dah, doo dah" and if somebody asked us why things aren't as nice and quiet as they used to be, we don't show them our noisemaker, we just say, "O doo dah day."
And then we sang the whole thing through again, and it sounded different and we did the other verses, that Amanda had printed up with her throwing in commentary. "Old muley cow come onto the track, doo dah, doo dah, the bob tail fly her over her back, o etc." was a distracting plot by the Camptown ladies to cover a slave escape. Promises tomorrow to tell us how "I've Been Working on the Railroad" is a song of women plotting for freedom as their men work for multinational corporations"
