[1] Produced by two generations of the Alley family, the one-panel cartoon originated with the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper The Commercial Appeal, where it ran on the front page.

The character of Hambone was inspired by Alley's encounter with a philosophical former slave, Tom Hunley of Greenwood, Mississippi.

And sho nuff, I'se comin' up de stairs one day a-gnawin' on a big ham-bone what a white lady had guv me.

[1] Hambone's Meditations was inspired by cartoonist Kin Hubbard's Abe Martin of Brown County (syndicated 1904 to 1930), a hillbilly antihero prone to wisecracks jokes and the utterance of popular sayings.

The introduction to the 1919 strip collection, published by Jahl & Co., typifies the majority white readership's relationship to Hambone's Meditations: The Negro of the South lives close to the soil and retains his racial originality—his superstitions, his quaint idiosyncrasies of thought and action.

He is a clearcut type of the old time darky, unspoiled by the equality ideas of the younger generation about him.Historian Michael Honey described the humiliation felt by African Americans due to by Hambone's Meditations: The grinning simpleton Hambone, through his exaggerated lips, spoke in dialect, saying such things as, 'Ef tomorrow evuh do come, I reck'n Ole Tom gwine be de busies' man in de whole worl'!!!'

Judge and civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks related this image to 'total and colossal indifference to negroes and their accomplishments.

'[4]The presence of Hambone on the front page of the Commercial Appeal was noted unfavorably by journalist Garry Wills while covering the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination.