Walter Niemann (1876-1953): Louisiana Suite, op. 97
1. The Mississippi Steam-Boat’s in Sight
(“The Glendy Burke” – Stephen C. Foster)
2. My Old Kentucky Home (Stephen C. Foster)
3. The Interrupted Serenade
(“Old Black Joe” – Stephen C. Foster; “Massa’s in the Cold Ground” – Stephen C. Foster; “Oh! boys carry me ‘long” – Stephen C. Foster; “Gentle Nettie Moore” – Pike)
4. Longing for Home
(“Old Folks at Home” (Way down upon the Swanee River) – Stephen C. Foster)
5. Mardi Gras in New Orleans
(“Dixie’s Land” – Dan Emmet)
John Kersey, piano

Foreword by Walter Niemann (1924)
The following Suite contains eight of the finest and best-known popular Negro-Songs, such as were chiefly sung on the vast Cotton- and Sugar-plantations in the Southern States of North America, and arranged by the composer.

By far the finest songs, born of and permeated with the national spirit, both as regards the words and the music, are those written by America’s most popular and earliest song-composer, Stephen C. Foster (1826 to 1864). His chief aim throughout was to counter-balance the predominating number of sad or religious songs with merry, cheerful tunes. Both kinds breathe the very soul of these great big grown-up black children, whose spirit feels, pulsates and responds just as vividly and deeply, as cheerfully and tenderly to the joys and sorrows of life, as our own.

The grief and sorrow for the old abandoned country is mostly done full justice to and pulsates in most of these songs; thus, for instance, in the heart-touching tune “My old Kentucky Home” or in the early “Song of Home”; The “Old Folks at Home”, the rendering of which is so beautifully described by the German poet Paul Keller, when he says “She sang this most pathetic of all Songs of Home with deep heart-born emotion, and Mr. Brown hummed the accompaniment with a nasal tone, as the negroes do, when, far from home, one of them, leaning against the wall, allows his inmost, heart-felt sorrow and the grief of his enslaved soul to flow forth in song. Then all, with motionless body, like rigid statues, join in the humming-part, their large eyes fed with burning tears gazing, staring at the yellow light of the dim lamps.”

The tunes or melodies upon which “The Interrupted Serenade” is based, belong to the series or class of songs expressive of: the heart, forlorn and longing for death (“Old black Joe”), -lamenting the dead (“Massa’s in the cold ground”), –farewell to life (“Oh boys, carry me ‘long!”) They all impressed the minstrel accompanying himself on the banjo, the national instrument of the negroes, as being too sad, hence his ever-increasing desire, his demand for something merry and cheerful, resulting in his winding up with a little serenade to his sweetheart: “Nettie Moore”. This leads to the class of cheerful songs, as delightful in their simple, childlike purity and mirth, as they are fascinating in their charm of melody and rhythm.

Such a one is “Dixie Land” – that beautiful, tropical Florida in the South, where the minstrel’s cradle stood, and finally that delicious melody in praise of the famous old Mississippi Express-boat “Glendy Burke”.