A Song Unsung

A tale of small town racism and excellence

Foster, Stephen Collins, "De Camptown Races" (1905). Historic Sheet Music Collection. 1889. Source

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Warning: This essay contains offensive language.

Before integrating in 1971, Merrill Junior High School was one of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas area’s four segregated high schools for Black students. Midway through that school year, my family relocated from Little Rock to Pine Bluff.

When I arrived at Merrill, its students were still acclimating to integration. Black and white students were going through the growing pains associated with occupying the same educational space. The previous semester marked my first experience in attending a desegregated school, so I was apprehensive as well.

My mother insisted my involvement in the school’s extracurricular activities. Since the football team had little interest in nearsighted asthmatics, we settled on the school’s choir as the most viable option. I could carry a tune, plus the best-looking girls seemed to gravitate to the choral department, so I offered little resistance.

Towards the end of my time at Merrill, the choral director encouraged to try out for the Pine Bluff High School A Cappella Choir. I took his advice. A few days after my tryout, I learned I’d landed a spot in the tenor section. I was also invited to join a smaller choral group called the Pine Bluff Singers.

When word got around town that I’d made it into this choir, the congratulatory phone calls poured in. The level of enthusiasm was so over the top, we wondered why my involvement in this high school choir warranted so much attention. Unbeknownst to us, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, getting into this choir—not to mention the other group—was a Big Fucking Deal.

My parents were informed that it was easier to make the varsity football squad at PBHS than it was to earn a spot in the a cappella choir. We were told new entrants to this choral group typically arrived with years of vocal training under their belts. In Pine Bluff’s music circles, the idea of a relatively untrained child achieving this level of musical achievement was as anomalous as a walk-on athlete landing a starting position on an NFL roster.

We found out later that I was one of only a handful of students selected to join that choir that year. I was the only freshman selected, and the only African American. Indeed, there were only a handful of Black students in the sixty-member choir.

The PBHS A Cappella Choir was a musical juggernaut, winning more accolades than you can imagine. The choir’s director, who was responsible for a record of success going back more than a decade, had more swagger than an SEC football coach.

And rightfully so. This small-town choir had won the All-State Choir championship several years running. It's members had performed before a host of dignitaries, from the state's governors to President Richard Nixon.

The choir’s practice facility was built like a recording studio, and routinely recorded their practice sessions. Today, you can even buy the choir’s albums on the Internet. When public television came to Arkansas in the sixties, the first event aired on the new PBS station was a performance by this choir from little Pine Bluff.

The Pine Bluff Singers, which I’d stumbled into without really trying, was an elite ten-person group handpicked from the main choir. The previous year, they toured the Holy Lands, performing concerts all over the Middle East. This high school choir from Podunk Arkansas even performed for the Shah of Iran.

It was the ‘70s, but it felt a whole lot like the ‘60s

As a member of the a cappella choir, I was part of a privileged group of students. We were allowed to leave school for midday luncheon performances at the Pine Bluff Country Club, or at a venue for the American Legion, or the Rotary Club.

But as much as I enjoyed the singing, it bothered me that most of these performances were almost always to all-white audiences.

In the mid-seventies, Pine Bluff was still a very segregated town. The town’s country club still had a whites-only membership policy, so when we performed there, waiters and cooks were the only other Black folks I ever saw.

Technically, my high school was a public school, but for all intents and purposes, its team sports were segregated. The football, basketball, and track teams were loaded with Black athletes, but the only Black player on the school's baseball team was a kid whose dad owned a neighborhood service station. Since the PBHS golf and tennis teams practiced at the country club, Black students didn't bother trying out.

Teen Town, a membership-only recreational club just off the high school’s campus, was also segregated. The shoddy building that served as the Boys’ Club for the town’s Black children featured a run-down asphalt basketball court with netless goals.

The other club, literally referred to as “the white Boys’ Club,” (I initially thought the club was named after a person whose last name was White) had all the recreational accoutrements a child could want. Once, my father took me and my brothers there to join, just so we’d have first hand experience wthe last gasps of Jim Crow. As he expected, we were refused membership and asked to leave the building.

In fairness, I gained a wealth of knowledge from being in the a cappella choir. We performed Broadway show tunes from “Pippen,” and “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” We sang madrigals and other secular music—always in Latin. At Christmastime, we performed Handel’s Messiah.

As much as I enjoyed those experiences, I never understood why performing at all-white venues didn't bother the other Black choir members as much as it did me. In retrospect, I suppose they, and their parents, were willing to accept a certain amount of racism in exchange for inclusion in the elite choral group. I was not.

My moment of truth came the day the choir director distributed sheet music to a song entitled “Camptown Races.” I’d heard of it, but never paid much attention to the lyrics. The song was written in 1850 by Stephen Foster, a composer widely considered America’s first professional songwriter.

“Camptown Races” was Foster’s follow-up to “Oh, Suzanna,” Foster’s first big hit. Like many of his compositions, its lyrics portrayed the stereotypical and racist speech patterns associated with enslaved African Americans. Originally titled “Gwine to Run All Night,” the first published edition of the song was marketed as “a favorite Ethiopian song:”

De camptown ladies sing dis song
Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
De camptown racetrack five miles long
Oh! Doo-dah day.
I come down here wid my hat caved in
Doo-dah! Doo-dah!
I go back home wid ma pocket full of tin
Oh! Doo-dah day.
Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day
I bet my money on a bobtail nag, somebody bet on de bay.

Foster gave exclusive performance rights for many of his songs to Christy's Minstrels, a white group that performed in blackface. Their performances catapulted the song into the American mainstream. The song became so popular, its melody was used ten years later in a song for Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign.

1844 sheet music cover for a collection of songs by Christy's Minstrels.

As the rest of the a cappella choir attempted to replicate the song’s Negro dialect, I pressed my lips together tightly. I was determined not to sing a single racist note. When I locked eyes with the choir's director, I realized my silence had not gone unnoticed. I should've expected the events that followed.

In return for my silent protest, the choir director labeled me a troublemaker, a radical. He cautioned other members of the choir to avoid associating with me. When I later decided I was no longer comfortable performing at the Pine Bluff Country Club, it cost me my spot in the Pine Bluff Singers.

Now and then, I think about my days in the choir which was the best Pine Bluff had to offer. Strangely, most of my memories of Pine Bluff High’s A Cappella Choir are good ones. Occasionally, I find myself humming Guiseppi Verdi’s Ave Maria or some other song that, if not for that flawed moment in time, I would never have learned. Sometimes, I think about how easy it would have been to sing the song that made Stephen Foster famous.

The choir director I butted heads with has long since passed away. But I often wonder how he foresaw the troublemaking radical I would become—even before I knew it myself.