Black Stephen Foster

Carry me back to old Virginny,

There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,

There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

There's where the old darkey's heart am long'd to go.

In 1875 a dapper young Negro minstrel-show man named James A. Bland penned these words, wrote a tune to go with them, and launched one of the most perennially popular of U. S. songs. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny was sung so long & loud that 63 years later the Virginia Conservation Commission wanted it made Virginia's official State anthem. Few singers of the song knew or cared who wrote it. If the question ever came up, someone usually said it was one of famed U. S. Songwriter Stephen Foster's (Swanee River, Oh! Susanna! etc.). Fame never caught up with black Songwriter Bland, but death did: in 1911 he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in a corner of Merion, Pa.'s scrubby little Negro cemetery.

Last year Philadelphia's pink and twinkly Music Publisher James Francis Cooke, whose Oliver Ditson Music Co. had turned many a penny publishing Songwriter Bland's bestseller, began to wonder who James A. Bland really was. In vain he consulted the heftiest musical encyclopedias. Even Ditson's oldest officials had no recollection of any James A. Bland.

In Washington, D. C. sleuthing Publisher Cooke found his first hot trail. At neat Negro Howard University he met a bent, white-haired mathematics professor, Dr. Kelly Miller, who told him that Bland had been survived by two sisters. One of them, a seamstress, thought she remembered where Bland had been buried and the number on his gravestone. Two months ago, after poking about among the headstones in Merion's old cemetery, Publisher Cooke found Bland's grave: a small mound covered with weeds and poison ivy.

Fortnight ago, on Emancipation Day, a large group of Negro celebrities gathered at this forlorn spot, listened to a flowery oration by Publisher Cooke, then paraded past the grave, dropping gladioli and singing "Carry me back. . . ." Among the singers: famed Negro Blues Composer William Christopher Handy, Composer J. Rosamond (brother of James Weldon) Johnson. Meanwhile spontaneous contributions for a James Bland Memorial began to pile up in Publisher Cooke's Philadelphia office. It looked as if James Bland's grave might soon have something better on it than poison ivy.

The author of Carry Me Back to Old Virginny was a native of Flushing, L. I. The son of one of the first U. S. Negro college graduates (Oberlin '45), Bland himself attended Washington's Howard University. Handsome and honey-voiced, he could not stay away from music. Because white men in blackface hogged the field of U. S. minstrel shows, Bland did not get very far in his U. S. minstrel career. In London, however, where he went as end man with Billy Kersands' Minstrel Troupe, he made a big hit, earned $10,000 a year and King Edward VII's (then Prince of Wales) personal bravos. And all the time, without bothering to get them copyrighted, he wrote songs (some 700), many of them today either unpublished or unidentified. The best of them (Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, In the Morning by the Bright Light, In the Evening by the Moonlight, etc.) stood high in the list of bestsellers. Today's music connoisseurs are beginning to call Bland "the Negro Stephen Foster," to rate him after Foster as the second greatest U. S. writer of Southern songs. During his lifetime, Minstrel Bland called himself, more modestly, "the best Ethiopian song writer in the world."

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