Ring, Ring de Banjo

American minstrel song

"Ring, Ring de Banjo"
Song
Published	1851
Songwriter(s)	Stephen Foster

Ring, Ring de Banjo is a minstrel song written in 1851. The song's words and music are from Stephen Foster.

The song, written to mimic the dialect of Black people in the Southern United States, is about a newly-freed slave who wishes to come back to his master's plantation. As his old master is dying, the singer plays the banjo on his old master's deathbed until he dies.^[1] It is one of "minstrelsy's most explicit evocations of the potentially violent relationship in slavery between master and slave"^[2] and inspired a number of imitators, including the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.^[3]

References

^ Hall, Dennis; Hall, Susan G. (2006). American Icons. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-313-02767-3.
^ Walker, Janet (2001). Westerns: Films Through History. Psychology Press. p. 173. ISBN 978-0-415-92424-5.
^ Starr, S. Frederick (2000). Louis Moreau Gottschalk. University of Illinois Press. p. 147. ISBN 978-0-252-06876-8.

Stephen Foster

List of songs

Songs

Minstrel songs: Angelina Baker (1850); Camptown Races (1850); The Glendy Burk (1860); My Old Kentucky Home (1853); Oh! Susanna (1848); Ring, Ring de Banjo (1851); Old Folks at Home (Swanee River) (1851); Massa's in De Cold Ground (1852)