OLD BLACK JOE

 OLD BLACK JOE 

By:

STEPHEN C FOSTER 

Arr CARL MATZ 

STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER was not a very methodical student, but he had the rare faculty of reaching far ahead and grasping much with little effort. He had the benefit of good school training. and loved to ramble in the woods over the hills and by the rivers of his home near Pittsburg in Western Pennsylvania. When a boy, he showed unusual gifts in comedy, though a youth of modest and retiring disposition. Any musical instrument that attracted him, he soon learned to play; and the piano he played remarkably well. As he grew older, he studied with enthusiam the works of the masters in music, especially Beethoven, Mozart and Weber. They were his delight.The simple melodies that he wrote,were not flashes from an un cultured brain, but the result of thorough and laborious analysis of harmonies, and when he gave them to the world he knew they would strike favorably the ear of the most critical as well as the unlearned in music. Some of his best songs are plantation melodies, but his poetic fancy ran rather to songs of sentiment. His last plantation song written in 1860 was "Old Black Joe." It is known all over the English speaking world. A half-dozen of his best songs are given in "Flag of the Free ,No 1" four more of them in the present number. 

1. I Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,

Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,

Gone from the earth to a better land I know,

I hear their gentle voices calling, "Old Black Joe."

CHORUS

I'm m coming, I'm coming, For my head is bending low.

I hear those gentle voices calling, "Old Black Joe."

2.Why do I sigh that my friends come not again,

Grieving  for forms now departed long ago? 

I hear their gentle voices calling, "Old Black Joe."  

3.Where are the hearts so happy and so free?

The children so dear. that I held up on my knee?

Gone to the shore  where my soul ed long a go has longed to go

I hear their gentle voices calling, "Old Black Joe."     

References:

1.PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL JOURNAL OCTOBER 1904