WARNING: This is a blackface minstrel song, a genre that features demeaning caricatures rooted in racism and white supremacy.

Firth, Pond & Co. deposited Stephen C. Foster’s “Old Black Joe” for copyright on November 8, 1860. 

According to Evelyn Foster Morneweck’s The Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family: 

Stephen’s granddaughter, Jessie W. Rose, paints an attractive picture of the pleasant and hospitable McDowell home. “Old Black Joe” of Stephen’s song was, according to Mrs. Rose, the McDowell family butler and handy man.

“Joe . . . was a very real person, and drove Dr. McDowell’s buggy for many years. In the evenings he ‘pottered,’ as grandma expressed it, around the house, and felt all dressed up in an old blue coat with brass buttons on the tails—the coat only doing duty when Joe ‘buttled’ in the house. He loved ‘his family’ dearly and when the beaux of the period brought their stiff starched bouquets to the McDowell girls, five of them then living, no one was more intensely pleased than Joe. Grandma recalled him shuffling down the hall carrying a bouquet behind his back, his countenance shining with delight, and calling in a pleased voice ‘Miss Jinny! Miss Jinny! Come see what I have for you!’ When dusk came, Joe lit the candles and lamps—laid the logs in the fire place, and waited upon the door. All through the sweetheart days Joe watched Foster come and go. The two became great friends. ‘Someday I'm going to put you in a song, Joe,’ Foster told him, and felt in his heart that it was a promise. The old man was gone when the day of fulfillment came, but today and perhaps always ‘Old Black Joe’ lives again.

There is one remembrance that comes to me at this writing, and that is how inseparably the song ‘Old Black Joe’ was associated in my grandmother’s mind with her own life and family. It was the one song we couldn’t sing in Grandma’s hearing during her last years. It brought back days of unforgettable happiness among those she had loved and lost, and left her always in tears. ‘Don’t sing “Old Black Joe”’ was understood among us.”