The lyric “I come from Alabama with my...” is completed by “banjo” in Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.”
Foster wrote the song in Cincinnati in 1846, and it was first published by W. C. Peters & Co. in 1848. A local quintet reportedly performed it publicly in Pittsburgh in September 1847. Minstrel troupes quickly spread the song, helping make it one of the best-known American songs of the 19th century.
The banjo is part of the narrator’s image as he travels from Alabama toward Louisiana to see his sweetheart. The song also uses deliberately comic contradictions, including rain that falls all night while the weather is dry and heat so intense that the singer freezes.
Modern performances often omit or revise verses from the original, whose minstrel context included racist stereotypes and offensive language. That history explains why many family, school, and commercial versions use shortened or rewritten lyrics. Despite those changes, “banjo” remains the canonical answer to the opening line.