on The Works and Life of Stephen Foster
"So far as I know, only one song has ever made the Hit Parade eighty seven years after it was written and seventy seven years after the death of it's composer. That song is Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, by Stephen Collins Foster. In 1940 and '41, when the broadcasters and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers were feuding, the radio suddenly discovered Jeanie. She was sung, she was played as a ballad, and aria, a chorus, a fantasy, a ballet, a foxtrot, a swing tune. It is a safe wager that during those two years Foster's ballad had more performances and was heard by more people than in all the years since it's creation. The wonder is that it survived such mauling, that it has not departed into Limbo together with Yes, We Have No Bananas and the Hut Sut Song.
Survived it has, for it has in it the stuff of imperishability. Together with a half dozen of Foster's other songs, it will be heard for many generations to come. Just why? What is the peculiar charm about so many of Foster's songs that sets them apart from the works of his contemporaries, that keeps them alive and glowing today? For one thing, they are great tunes, true melodies. In their pristine versions their accompaniments were primitive in harmony and childishly simple in form. The radio and dance bands have brought the harmonies up to date and some of their accompaniments and arrangements are fearsomely sophisticated. No Matter. Foster's airs lean upon no accompaniment. Many of them are almost more effective without any accompaniment at all. Also, they are well within the range of the average, untutored voice, without ever conveying any sense of deliberate limitation. A child can sing them; so can a coloratura. In his own field their creator, who started as a bookkeeper and ended in a free hospital ward, was a genius.
Incidentally, I don't subscribe to the popular assumption that Foster was cheated and exploited with especial malignancy. Only two persons actually exploited him: Christy, who put his own name as composer to The Old Folks at Home and kept it there for the life of the copyright, and Peters, who bought (or was given) Oh! Susanna outright and never shared with Foster a penny of the fortune he made from it. Yet even these two have a case. They drove a hard bargain, but it was not an exceptional one. They would probably have been bewildered if the composer had complained; nor is there any record that he ever did protest to Peters.
His other publishers treated him fairly, even by present-day standards, advancing him money and paying him about the same royalty that a contemporary songwriter receives. Foster's calamity was to have lived in the age that he did. The hardness of his lot has been spotlighted by the brilliance of his talent, but it was the common lot of all composers of his time (and many another since). If he found it difficult to make a bare living in his later years, one cause was the fact that out of his last hundred songs, only one, Old Black Joe, was a hit. His average yearly income, during his comparatively prosperous years, was about seventeen hundred dollars. Today, as a double-A member of A.S.C.A.P. (which of course he would be) he would receive something more than ten times that sum. But that is idle speculation. We are talking of 1860, not 1946.
But to get back to Foster's songs. What quality have they that gives them such tremendous staying power? After all, other men, in his day, wrote songs that were simple, easy to sing, and easy to remember. Some of them were as popular as his, possibly more so, at the time. What was his secret?
It was, I think, that he helped to fill a gap that had always existed in our musical culture. Technically, we have no folksongs. Our ancestors, coming here from all quarters of the globe, brought with them the folksongs of what had been their native lands. These songs went into the melting pot and emerged, warped and often corrupted. They were recognizable, but they were not, and are not, peculiarly ours. It is ironic that the only race that developed a folksong literature in this country is the race that was brought here against it's will, and was and has been the most brutally exploited of all-the Negro. The Negro spirituals and Stephen Foster's songs are the nearest to completely indigenous folksongs that we possess.
Nor is it, I think, a coincidence that most of the best of his songs are in Negro dialect and sing the woes of the Negro. A folksong is the speech of primitive people, of simple persons; It is highly improbably that the Russian Ippolitoff-Ivanoff ever heard of Foster. But is is not strange that both the Sidar's March from the Caucasian Sketches and Old Black Joe start off with the identical phrase. Both are expressions of primitive life. Foster's acquaintance with the Negro may have been superficial, may even have been confined to the phony Negro of darky minstrelsy. Nevertheless, that acquaintance, and his choice of idiom, forced him to think in simple, clear, universal terms. And that thinking produced songs that find and eternal echo in our hearts.
Stephen Collins Foster, by John Tasker Howard
from "A Treasury Of Stephen Foster"
First printing, copyright 1946, by Random House, Inc.
Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, on the Fourth of July in 1826. That was a most important Fourth; it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was on that day, too, that the second and third Presidents of our nation died--John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
At the very moment that Stephen was born, his father was acting as "vice-president" of a boisterous celebration in "Foster's Grove." His part in the celebration was to toast "the Independence of the United States, acquired," to use his own words, "by blood and valor of our venerable progenitors. To us," he continued, "they bequeathed the dear-bought inheritance; to our care and protection they consigned it; and the most sacred obligations are upon us to transmit the glorious purchase, unfettered by power, to our innocent and beloved offspring." And just as the elder Foster was speaking these words, exactly at noon, a servant ran from the house telling of the arrival of another "innocent and beloved offspring." She begged that the saluting cannon be stilled lest they injure the baby's ear-drums.
Young Stephen was the tenth of eleven children, and since his little brother James died in infancy, he remained the youngest of the family. These Fosters were prominent people in Western Pennsylvania; they were active in both political and commercial affairs. The father, William Barclay Foster, was at on time, Mayor of Allegheny, where he had settled after leaving Lawrenceville. The eldest son, William Barclay, Junior, was an engineer who laid out the route of many of the Ohio and Pennsylvania canals, and later that part of the Pennsylvania Railroad which crosses the Allegheny Mountains. When he died, he was a vice-president of the Railroad. One of Stephen's sisters, Ann Eliza, married Edward Buchanan, a brother of James Buchanan, fifteenth President of the United States. Another brother, Henry, was for a number of years in the land Office at Washington. Morrison, the son nearest in age to Stephen, became prominent in business and politics.
Stephen was different from the rest of the children. He was a dreamer, and above everything else, he loved music. He learned to play the flute and the violin, and he could pick out tunes on the piano. The other members of the family liked music, too, but they did not think that a man should spend too much time at it. There was more important work to be done in a flourishing pioneer community; music should be kept within reasonable limits as a pleasant pastime. When Stephen went to boarding school he promised that he would not pay any attention to his music until after eight o'clock in the evening.
On one occasion Stephen's father wrote to Brother William: "It is a source of much comfort to your mother and myself that Stephen does not appear to have any evil propensities to indulge; he seeks no associates, and his leisure hours are all devoted to music, for which he possesses a strange talent." Stephen's mother also tried to relieve William's anxiety about his youngest brother when she wrote a month later: "He is not so much devoted to music as he once was; other studies seem to be elevated in his opinion."
And so it went, the family always trying to make Stephen conform to the accepted, conventional pattern, closing their eyes to the talent that would some day make his name a household word throughout the world. They even tried to get him appointed to West Point, and Stephen himself suggest the Navy. Finally it was decided to send him to Cincinnati, where his brother Dunning had a commission business and would teach him to be a bookkeeper. So the twenty year old Stephen sailed down the Ohio, on one of the river boats he would some day immortalize in song, far more entranced with the singing of the Negro deckhands than with the figures he was to add for three long years.
Stephen stayed in Cincinnati from the Fall of 1846 until January or early February, 1850. These were the years of the Mexican War, and Dunning enlisted in the Army and left Stephen in the office with his partner in the business, Archibald Irwin. Stephen was a good bookkeeper; there is no evidence to support the legends that he was an idler and neglected his work. But he was always primarily interested in writing music and verses, and he spent much of his spare time cultivating the acquaintance of minstrel performers who might sing his songs in public. Some of these singers were unscrupulous and took the manuscript copies to publishers who promptly issued pirated editions. when Stephen himself found a publisher to issue Oh! Susanna and Old Uncle Ned, several other firms had already published these songs.
Oh! Susanna was probably composed before Stephen went to Cincinnati, but it was while he was there that he came in touch with W.C. Peters, a music publisher Stephens's family had known in Pittsburgh. Stephen gave Peters a number of songs, either for $100, or as an outright present, we do not know which. Peters made a fortune from them and Foster had no royalty interest. Instead, he gained from the songs the fame he needed to establish himself as a songwriter. Oh! Susanna became a folksong almost overnight. The Forty-niners caught it p and sang it on their way to California, and there was hardly a minstrel troupe that did not sing it at every performance.
As a result of this success, two publishers, one in New York and the other in Baltimore, offered Stephen royalty contracts and agreed to pay him two cents for every copy of his songs they sold. Now he could return to his family in Allegheny and prove to them that he could make a better living by songwriting than as a bookkeeper. He could also propose marriage to Jane McDowell and tell her that he had good prospects for supporting her. Jane was the daughter of a Pittsburgh physician who had died the previous Spring. She and Stephen were married July 22, 1850, and after a brief honeymoon in New York and Baltimore, they went to live with the Foster family in Allegheny.
Nobody knows exactly how happy a marriage it proved to be, even though the marital relations of Stephen and Jane have been used as the basis of fanciful movie plots and for radio sketches. Probably it was as happy as could be expected with a man of Stephen's temperament. Although there were several separations, one of them in 1854, it is not clear that they were caused by estrangements, and certainly not because Stephen loved another woman. In Stephen's last years Jane left him because he could not support her. Perhaps Jane was not over fond of music and had a lukewarm interest in Stephen's song-writing. It is probably that she nagged him, and that Stephen resented her trying to make him more of a businessman. Stephen was a dreamer, improvident and temperamentally difficult. Yet he was generous, sociable and lovable. He undoubtedly loved his wife and he adored his little daughter, Marion. In her old age this only child of Stephen Foster remembered her father chiefly for his constant desire that she and her mother should have a good time.
It was during the first five or six years of his married life that Stephen composed his finest songs: Old Folks at Home in 1851; Massa's in de Cold Ground in 1852; My Old Kentucky Home and Old Dog Tray in 1853; Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair in 1854; Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming in 1855 and Gentle Annie in 1856. The contracts he signed with Firth, Pond & Company of New York and with F. D Benteen of Baltimore gave him a fair income. In a little more than six years, Firth, Pond had paid him a total of $9,596.96, and Benteen $461.85. In the 1850's an income of a little less than $2,000 a year was adequate for comfortable living, but it did not constitute wealth, nor anything approaching what a songwriter today would earn if his works achieved popularity equal to those of Stephen Foster. Anyway, the Fosters spent a little more than Stephen earned each year, and his account book shows debts to landlords and tailors and borrowings from his brothers William and Morrison.
By 1857 financial matters reached a crisis; so Stephen drew up a list of what each of his songs had earned, then estimated what each of them should bring him in the future. He figured that the thirty six songs Firth, Pond & Company had on royalty were worth $2,786.77, and he offered to sell his future rights in those songs for that amount. Firth, Pond & Company settled for approximately two thirds of the sum Foster asked. They paid him $1,500 in cash and notes, and cancelled the amount of $372.28 which he had overdrawn on his previous royalty account - a total of $1,872.28. To Benteen Stephen sold for $200 the future rights in sixteen songs which had earned him $461.85 during the past six years.
A year later Foster made a new contract with Firth, Pond & Company in which he agreed to compose for them exclusively for two and a half years. He was to receive a royalty of ten per cent on the retail price of his songs and and advance of $100 on each song he wrote, up to twelve each year. This was a better contract, but by that time Stephen had passed his creative prime. In the two and a half years of the agreement, until August 9, 1860, he published sixteen songs which earned royalties of only $700. By July of 1860, he was overdrawn at the publishers by nearly $1,400; so once more the slate must be wiped clean. He sold his future rights to Firth, Pond & Company, this time for $1,600. The publishers deducted the overdraft and paid Stephen $203.36.
With this money Stephen settled his affairs in Allegheny and moved his family to New York, where he would be in closer touch with publishers and with minstrel performers. Firth, Pond is said to have offered him a salary of $800 for writing twelve songs a year, and a Philadelphia publisher, Lee & Walker, agreed to pay him $400 for six songs. These arrangements would assure him of at least $1,200 a year.
On his arrival in New York Stephen handed Firth, Pond & Company a song he had written just before he left home. The publishers must have been delighted to discover that it had all the warmth and richness of Stephen's great songs of earlier years. But Old Black Joe proved to be only a momentary flash of Stephen's former genius. During his last four years he turned out more than a hundred songs, but the quantity was not accompanied by quality. He often collaborated with lyric writers who provided him with the words he no longer wrote himself, and generally the results were mere potboilers.
The salary contracts with Firth, Pond & Company and with the Philadelphia firm did not last long; so Stephen began selling songs for cash to other publishers. Most of them were glad to have his name on their catalogues and were not too particular about the kind of songs they got, as long as they were by Stephen Foster. The cash was spent as soon as it was received, some of it for food and shelter and a large part for drink. By this time Stephen was using liquor as an escape from his worries, and had become and incurable alcoholic.
Jane tried to stick it out. When she and Marion came to New York with Stephen, the three of them boarded for a time at 113 Green Street, with Mrs. Louisa Stuart. Stephen worked hard. He made friends with the men of his profession and he started collaborating with some of them, notably with George Cooper, who provided him with the words of many of his Civil War songs. In later years Cooper was to become famous for the verses of Sweet Genevieve, to music by Henry Tucker. In the summer of 1861 Jane and Marion went to Lewistown, Pennsylvania, to visit Jane's sister. Stephen lived alone for several months, and his loneliness made him drink more heavily. By this time his habits were becoming a serious problem, and Jane paid what money she could for various "cures". Stephen patiently submitted to them and made an honest effort to throw off his craving for the "rum" a grocer on Hester Street made from French spirits and brown sugar.
By September Jane was worried. She borrowed train fare from Morrison Foster, and made a trip to New York. After one look at Stephen, she decided he must not be alone, and the family again tried living in a boarding house. But it did not work. The next summer Jane went back to Lewistown, and as far as is known, she did not live again with Stephen. Since Stephen could no longer support her, she became a telegrapher for the Pennsylvania Railroad at Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
She realized that New York was not the place for Stephen, and she did everything she could to get him away and to have him join her in some place where the strain and tension would be less. In her recently published Chronicles of Stephen Foster's Family, Stephen's niece, Evelyn Foster Morneweck, tells how various members of the family tried to help Jane persuade Stephen to leave. Stephen's sister, Ann Eliza Buchanan, sent her son to New York with instructions not to come home until he brought Stephen with him. Stephen received his nephew with such poise and sobriety that the young man reported to his mother that he could not have broached the matter without seeming very presumptuous.
Morrison Foster saw Stephen often during these years, and he tried hard to straighten him out. He gave him clothing, which Stephen usually sold for a few dollars as soon as Morrison had left. When Morrison told Stephen that he'd be afraid of being insulted if he himself were dressed so shabbily, Stephen replied: "Don't worry, Mitty. No gentleman will insult me, and no other can." Morrison was living in Cleveland and he tried to persuade Stephen to go there with him. But Stephen stayed in New York. He had friends there who would not try to reform him, and he was still the lovable and generous Stephen he had always been. Morrison was quite accurate when he said that the drink habit was the only failing Stephen ever had.
In January of 1864, he was living in a lodging house at the corner of Bayard Street and the Bowery, then known as the North American Hotel. He was ill and suffering from a "fever and ague." He may have been tuberculous; several of the Fosters are known to have had the disease. On the morning of January 10th, George Cooper received a message to come quickly to the hotel. Stephen was lying on the floor of his room. He had risen from his bed and fallen on a piece of crockery. Along his neck, near the jugular vein, was a long, bloody cut. A doctor came and sewed the cut with black thread. Then they dressed Stephen and took him to Bellevue Hospital.
Cooper wrote Morrison, and asked him to send money. Stephen improved at first, but on the third day in the hospital he fainted while his wounds were being dressed, and never became conscious again. He died at half past two on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 13, 1864. Cooper sent Morrison a telegram which arrived ahead of his letter. So Morrison and Jane, joined by brother Henry, came to New York and took Stephen's body from the morgue, back to Pittsburgh, where it was laid to rest in the family plot in Allegheny Cemetery.
At the hospital the warden handed Morrison and inventory of Stephen's possessions: "Coat, pants, vest, hat, shoes, overcoat." One item was not mentioned - a little purse containing thirty eight cents in coin and scrip, and a slip of paper with these penciled words: "Dear friends and gentle hearts." Perhaps this was to be the title for a song, but whatever it was, it described quite accurately the man who added Old Folks at Home to the spiritual riches of the world.
The little purse and its contents are preserved today at the Foster Hall Collection of the University of Pittsburgh, together with the manuscript book which Stephen used for working out the words of all the songs he wrote from 1850 to 1860, the account book in which he kept a record of his finances, his contracts with publishers, and every known edition of all his songs. This Collection was founded in Indianapolis by Josiah Kirby Lilly and for a number of years it was housed in a little stone building on the Lilly estate which became known as Foster Hall. In 1937 Mr. Lilly presented the entire collection to the Stephen Foster Memorial at Pittsburgh, and it was placed in the newly erected memorial building on the campus of the University. And in 1940 the problem child of the Foster family became the first musician to be elected to the Hall of Fame of New York University.
Foster composed almost two hundred songs and a few instrumental pieces. Of the songs, a half dozen rank with the world's greatest ballads; at least twenty five of them have become American folksongs; and more than fifty are well worthy of preservation. Foster's songs fall into several types. The songs he wrote for the minstrel shows, the so-called "Ethiopian songs," were either the nonsense type of Oh! Susanna and Camptown Races, or the homesick plantation songs - Old Folks at Home, My Old Kentucky Home, and Massa's in de Cold Ground.
Foster composed many sentimental songs, many of them in the style of the English ballad that was current in nineteenth century America. The songs he sold for small sums of cash in his last four years included Civil War songs, topical songs, Sunday-School hymns, and comic songs. Few of them have survived, and it is just as well for Stephen's reputation that they are little known today.
Stephen Foster achieved a truly American expression. Born and bred in Pittsburgh, he was not influenced by the foreign music that enslaved the composers who lived in the more cosmopolitan seaboard cities. The voices Stephen heard were those of the minstrel shows, the singing and dancing of Negroes on the wharves of the Ohio River, and the sentimental songs of mid-century that were carried through the country by the "singing family" troupes, and were sung by demure young ladies who played the accompaniments on square pianos covered with brocade and lace.
While the minstrel shows helped to produce Stephen Foster by providing a market for his songs, they were also a medium which Stephen himself reformed. He found their songs crude, vulgar ditties, which struck the popular fancy, and he made into a folk-literature something that had reeked of the alley and the barroom. Foster's songs are full of the spirit of pioneers, full of the carefree impertinence that snaps its fingers at fate and the universe. Unconsciously, and without any attempt to be a nationalist, Stephen Foster wrote into his songs the subtle traits that characterize Americans.
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