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88 Youth's Golden Gleam
The buckwheat cake was in her mouf, de tear was in
her eye, y
I says, I'se coming from de souf, Susanna don t you
cry.8
Fond as he must have been of the immortal tune to these words Stephen was not at first proud of "Oh! Susanna" or of his other early Ethiopian melodies. We have already quoted his own explanation: "I had the intention of omitting my name on my Ethiopian songs, owing to the prejudice against them by some, which might injure my refutation as a writer of another style of music. '9
"Away Down South" was a third^ tune which bobbed up in Stephen's head in his earliest months in Cincinnati. He sent it, along with the Susanna and Fairy's Dream manuscripts, to Pittsburgh where, astold in Chapter viii, all three were sung late in the summer of 1847 at concerts of the Andrews Opera Troupe. Stephen had a chance* to hear how they were rendered, inasmuch as this same company journeyed from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and, under the direction of Nelson Kneass, began an engagement at the National Theater on September 2a.10 As with movie productions today, they had a second-run engagement at the Masonic Hall and a third at Melodeon Hall. There is interest in the news
* An advertisement of Peters^ Field & Co. in the Daily Chronicle subsequently specified "Oh! Susanna," "Uncle Ned" and "Lou-'siana Belle" among the "popular Songs as sung by Kneass' Opera Troupe." |
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