Foster sent this song to E.P. Christy of the Christy Mistrels in 1850. It is what Foster came to call a "plantation" song, meaning that it was written in the dialect used by white performers in darkface minstrel shows. The original title was "Gwine to Run All Night." Contemporary accounts of horse racing show that its milieu was not a genteel one. The ladies who frequented a race that was to be run all night, calling "Doo-dah! doo-dah!," were perhaps singing it to attract customers. Today we get the pronunciation wrong; Stephen's brother Morrison Foster always sang it with "dah" having the same vowel as "dad."

Despite the efforts of Camptown (formerly Campton) Pennsylvania to claim itself as the site of the great five-mile-long racetrack, it was likely that the place referred to was literally a camp town, a temporary settlement, possibly African-American. The song exemplifies as well as any other the rhythmic vitality that Foster brought to the minstrel song genre.

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