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Songs of the South

It's Stephen Foster Memorial Day and the anniversary of the Pittsburgh songwriter's death in 1864.

Among Foster's popular songs are "Oh, Susannah!" and "Old Folks at Home," as well as "Old Black Joe," which inspired this painting by Horace Pippin.

Seated on a split-log bench in a field of daisies, Old Black Joe looks sadly out at the viewer. Too old now to labor in the cotton fields that stretch beyond a great plantation house, he lives out his life tending to a child, who is tethered to him with a leash and whose mother keeps a sharp eye from the house. Pippin found inspiration for his canvas in Stephen Foster's 1860 song of the same title. It tells the story of the elderly slave and became popularized by Al Jolson's performance in the 1939 film Swanee River, a fictionalized musical biography of Foster.

The painting was commissioned by a manufacturer of radios for reproduction as a full-page Life magazine ad, where it helped sell the power of music as a soothing antidote to World War II. In its simple lines and bold colors, Pippin's work, however, avoided the sentimentality overlaid on it by the radio company and by Foster's minstrel ballad. The artist endows his figure with dignity and elevates the scene to a meditation on the moral vacuum of slavery.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: Horace Pippin, 1888–1946, Old Black Joe, 1943, oil, 24 x 30 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.