“The Yellow Rose of Texas” is a traditional American folk song dating back to at least the 1850s. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time. Several versions of the song have been recorded, including by Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson and Mitch Miller. Like many older songs, the lyrics have been changed and modified many times.
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My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night! is an anti-slavery ballad written by Stephen Foster. It was published in January 1853. He was likely inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with imagery witnessed on his visits to the Bardstown, Kentucky farm of Federal Hill.
In Foster’s sketchbook, the song was originally entitled “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!”, but he altered it to “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom that the song “awakens sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish”.
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