"Johnny Roach" is an American song

American popular music

American popular music had a profound effect on music across the world. The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant influence on global culture, including ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, rock, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, heavy metal, punk, disco, house, techno,...

 written by blackface

Blackface

Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 minstrel

Minstrel show

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

 composer Dan Emmett

Dan Emmett

Daniel Decatur "Dan" Emmett was an American songwriter and entertainer, founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition.-Biography:...

. The song was first published in 1859. The lyrics tell of a slave who has escaped to the Northern United States

Northern United States

Northern United States, also sometimes the North, may refer to:* A particular grouping of states or regions of the United States of America. The United States Census Bureau divides some of the northernmost United States into the Midwest Region and the Northeast Region...

. He laments his lost plantation

Plantation

A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...

 home and realizes that he really belongs in the South

Southern United States

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...

:

To Canada old John was bound

All by de railroad underground

Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...

;

He's got no clothes—he's got no "tin"

He wishes he was back agin.

The song is notable for being the first printed reference to the South as “Dixie’s Land”:

Gib me de place called "Dixie's Land,"

Wid hoe and shubble in my hand;

Whar fiddles ring an' banjos play,

I'll dance all night an' work all day.

A portion of the chorus was repeated in "Dixie

Dixie (song)

Countless lyrical variants of "Dixie" exist, but the version attributed to Dan Emmett and its variations are the most popular. Emmett's lyrics as they were originally intended reflect the mood of the United States in the late 1850s toward growing abolitionist sentiment. The song presented the point...

" with slight variation.