During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster composed the tunes the minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing more than a century later, like “Oh! Susanna,” “Dixie,” “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” and “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!” Edwin Pearce Christy’s group, Christy’s Minstrels, formed a band—banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine—whose combination of instruments laid the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown.
