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Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826January 13, 1864), known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour music and Folk music music during the Romantic music. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna", "Hard Times Come Again No More", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River"), "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "Old Black Joe", and "Beautiful Dreamer". Many of his compositions remain popular today.
Foster was born on July 4, 1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. His parents, William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson Foster, were of Ulster Scots and English people descent. He had three older sisters and six older brothers. He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, and received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics.
Foster taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute, and piano. In 1839, his brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at Towanda and thought that Stephen would benefit from being under the supervision of Henry Kleber (1816–1897), a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh. Under Kleber, Stephen was exposed to music composition. Together the pair studied the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert.
The site of the Camptown Races – which would provide both the title and setting for events of one of Foster's best-known songs – was located from Athens and from Towanda. Foster's education included a brief period at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, now part of Washington & Jefferson College. His tuition was paid, but he had little spending money. He left Canonsburg to visit Pittsburgh with another student and did not return.
Many of Foster's songs were used in the blackface popular at the time. He sought to "build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order". However, Foster's output of minstrel songs declined after the early 1850s, as he turned primarily to parlor music. Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon. Available archival evidence does not suggest that Foster was an abolitionist.
Foster's last four years were spent in New York City. There is little information on this period of his life, although family correspondence has been preserved. Access provided by the University of Pittsburgh Library System
Other biographers describe different accounts of his death. Historian JoAnne O'Connell speculates in her biography, The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster, that Foster may have killed himself. As O'Connell and musicologist Ken Emerson have noted, several of the songs Foster wrote during the last years of his life foreshadow his death, such as "The Little Ballad Girl" and "Kiss Me Dear Mother Ere I Die." Emerson says in his 2010 Stephen Foster and Co. that Foster's injuries may have been "accidental or self-inflicted".
The note inside Foster's wallet is said to have inspired Bob Hilliard's lyric for "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" (1949). Foster was buried in the Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. After his death, Morrison Foster became his "literary executor". As such, he answered requests for copies of manuscripts, autographs, and biographical information. After his death, "Beautiful Dreamer", one of the best-loved of his works, was posthumously published in 1864.
Foster also authored many church hymns, although the inclusion of his hymns in hymnals ended by 1910. Some of the hymns are "Seek and ye shall find", "All around is bright and fair, While we work for Jesus", and "Blame not those who weep and sigh". Several rare Civil War-era hymns by Foster were performed by The Old Stoughton Musical Society Chorus, including "The Pure, The Bright, The Beautiful", "Over The River", "Give Us This Day", and "What Shall The Harvest Be?". He also arranged many works by Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Joseph Lanner, Weber and Schubert for flute and guitar.
Foster usually sent his handwritten scores directly to his publishers. The publishers kept the sheet music manuscripts and did not give them to libraries nor return them to his heirs. Some of his original, hand-written scores were bought and put into private collections and the Library of Congress.
Foster's songs, lyrics, and melodies have often been altered by publishers and performers.
In 1957 Ray Charles released a version of "Old Folks at Home" that was titled "Swanee River Rock (Talkin’ ’Bout That River)", which became his first pop hit that November.Whitburn, Joel, Top R&B Singles, 1942–1999, p. 74.
In the 2000s "Old Folks at Home", designated the official state song of Florida in 1935, came under attack for what some regarded as offensive terms in the song's lyrics. Changes were made to them with the approval of the Stephen Foster Memorial. The modified song was kept as the official state song, while "Florida (Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky)" was added as the state anthem.
A 1974 published collection, Stephen Foster Song Book; Original Sheet Music of 40 Songs (New York : Dover Publications, Inc.), of Stephen Foster's popular songs was edited by musicologist Richard Jackson.
Two state parks are named in Foster's honor: the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida, and Stephen C. Foster State Park in Georgia. Both parks are on the Suwannee River. Stephen Foster Lake at Mt. Pisgah State Park in Pennsylvania is named after him.
One state park is named in honor of Foster's songs, My Old Kentucky Home State Park, a historic mansion formerly named Federal Hill, located in Bardstown, Kentucky, where Foster is said to have been an occasional visitor according to his brother, Morrison Foster. The park dedicated a bronze statue in honor of Stephen's work.
The Lawrenceville Historical Society, together with the Allegheny Cemetery Historical Association, hosts the annual Stephen Foster Music and Heritage Festival (Doo Dah Days!). Held the first weekend of July, Doo Dah Days! celebrates the life and music of one of the most influential songwriters in America's history. His home in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, still remains on Penn Avenue near the Foster School.
==Gallery==
The musicologist Ken Emerson has suggested that some of Foster's songs are "a source of racial embarrassment and infuriation."
Music scores
Career
Foster married Jane Denny McDowell on July 22, 1850, and they visited New York and Baltimore on their honeymoon. Foster then returned to Pennsylvania and wrote most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Ring de Banjo" (1851), "Old Folks at Home" (known also as "Swanee River", 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane.
Illness and death
became sick with a fever in January 1864. Weakened, it is possible he fell in his hotel in the Bowery and cut his neck; he may also have sought to take his own life. His writing partner George Cooper found him still alive but lying in a pool of blood. Foster died in Bellevue Hospital three days later at the age of 37. His leather wallet contained a scrap of paper that simply said, "Dear friends and gentle hearts", along with 37 cents in Civil War scrip and three pennies.
Music
Foster grew up in Lawrenceville, now a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where many European immigrants had settled and were accustomed to hearing the music of the Italian, Scots-Irish, and German residents. He composed his first song when he was 14 and entitled it the "Tioga Waltz". The first song that he had published was "Open thy Lattice Love" (1844). Access provided by the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote songs in support of drinking, such as "My Wife Is a Most Knowing Woman", "Mr. and Mrs. Brown", and "When the Bowl Goes Round", while also composing temperance songs such as "Comrades Fill No Glass for Me" or "The Wife".
Popular songs
"My Old Kentucky Home" is the official state song of Kentucky, adopted by the General Assembly on March 19, 1928.
(2025). 9780807832394, University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807832394 Access provided by the University of Pittsburgh
Legacy
Musical influence
Songs
Television
Film
Many early filmmakers selected Foster's songs for their work because his copyrights had expired and cost them nothing. The 1935 technicolor musical short film Memories and Melodies depicts Collins trying to sell a song at the local music shop and reminiscing. Other Hollywood films include Harmony Lane (1935) with Douglass Montgomery, Swanee River (1939) with Don Ameche, and I Dream of Jeanie (1952), with Bill Shirley. The 1939 production was one of Twentieth Century Fox's more ambitious efforts, filmed in Technicolor; the other two were low-budget affairs made by B-movie studios.
Other events
Art
Accolades and honors
Foster is honored on the University of Pittsburgh campus with the Stephen Foster Memorial, a landmark building that houses the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum, the Center for American Music, and two theaters: the Charity Randall Theatre and Henry Heymann Theatre, both performance spaces for Pitt's Department of Theater Arts. It is the largest repository for original Stephen Foster compositions, recordings, and other memorabilia his songs have inspired worldwide.
Statue controversy and later views
A 1900 statue of Foster by Giuseppe Moretti was located in Schenley Plaza, in Pittsburgh, from 1940 until 2018. On the unanimous recommendation of the Pittsburgh Art Commission, the statue was removed on April 26, 2018. Its new home has not yet been determined. It has a long reputation as the most controversial public art in Pittsburgh "for its depiction of an African-American banjo player at the feet of the seated composer. Critics say the statue glorifies white appropriation of black culture and depicts the vacantly smiling musician in a way that is at best condescending and at worst racist." A city-appointed Task Force on Women in Public Art called for the statue to be replaced with one honoring an African American woman with ties to the Pittsburgh community. The Task Force held a series of community forums in Pittsburgh to collect public feedback on the statue replacement and circulated an online form which allowed the public to vote for one of seven previously selected candidates or write in an alternate suggestion. However, the Task Force on Women in Public Art and the Pittsburgh Art Commission have not reached an agreement as to who will be commemorated or if the statue will stay in the Schenley Plaza location.
See also
Notes
Further reading
(2025). 9781258193980, Literary Licensing. ISBN 9781258193980
(2025). 9780548971864, Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 9780548971864
(1973). 9780804617420, Associated Faculty Press. ISBN 9780804617420
External links
Categories: 1826 Births, 1864 Deaths, 19th-century American Composers, 19th-century American Male Musicians, 19th-century American Male Writers, 19th-century American Songwriters, Accidental Deaths In New York, Accidental Deaths From Falls, American Male Composers, American Male Lyricists, American People Of English Descent, American People Of Scotch-irish Descent, Blackface Minstrel Songwriters, Burials At Allegheny Cemetery, Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Inductees, Musicians From Pittsburgh, Songwriters From Pennsylvania, Washington & Jefferson College Alumni
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