Controversy
Written in the first person from the perspective of a black slave (at a time when slavery was legal in half of the states of the US), the song has its narrator "longing for de old plantation," which has long drawn criticism as romanticizing slavery, although Foster himself supported the North during the American Civil War and supported abolition of slavery.
A word now long reckoned an ethnic slur, "darkies", that is used in the lyrics has become such an embarrassment for singers and audiences alike that at public performances words like "lordy," "mama," "darling," "brothers" or "dear ones" are typically used in place of the offensive word.
The text is written, as is usual in minstrel songs, in a cross between the dialect generally spoken by African slaves and standard American English — the former being attested to as in use as late as the 1940s in the works of the black Floridian folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, and is an archaic form of contemporary African American Vernacular English — and this is seen by some as racism against black Americans.
In practice, the pronunciation as written in dialect has long been disregarded and the corresponding standard American English usage has been sung, as witnessed by the song's performances at the 1955 Florida Folk Festival.
Read more about this topic: Old Folks At Home
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