Stephen Foster was born 188 years ago today. Known as the father of American music,” Foster was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century. His songs — such as Oh! Susanna,” Camptown Races,” Old Folks at Home (Swanee River), Hard Times Come Again No More,” My Old Kentucky Home,” Old Black Joe,” Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and Beautiful Dreamer — remain popular over 150 years after their composition. Foster attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens and Towanda, Pennsylvania. He received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin and Greek and mathematics. In 1846, Foster moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and became a bookkeeper with his brothers steamship company. While in Cincinnati, Foster penned his first successful songs, among them Oh! Susanna which would prove to be the anthem of the California Gold Rush in 1848–1849. In 1849, he published Fosters Ethiopian Melodies, which included the successful song Nelly Was a Lady,” made famous by the Christy Minstrels. A plaque marks the site of Fosters residence in Cincinnati, where the Guilford School building is now located. Although many of his songs had Southern themes, Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, by river-boat voyage (on his brother Dunnings steam boat, the Millinger) down the Mississippi to New Orleans, during his honeymoon in 1852. Foster attempted to make a living as a professional songwriter and may be considered innovative in this respect, since this field did not yet exist in the modern sense. Due in part to the limited scope of music copyright and composer royalties at the time, Foster realized very little of the profits which his works generated for sheet music printers. Multiple publishers often printed their own competing editions of Fosters tunes, not paying Foster anything. For Oh, Susanna, he received $100. Foster moved to New York City in 1860. About a year later, his wife and daughter left him and returned to Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1862, his fortunes decreased, and as they did, so did the quality of his new songs. Early in 1863, he began working with George Cooper, whose lyrics were often humorous and designed to appeal to musical theater audiences. The Civil War created a flurry of newly written music with patriotic war themes, but this did not benefit Foster. Stephen Foster had become impoverished while living at the North American Hotel at 30 Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York. He was reportedly confined to his bed for days by a persistent fever; Foster tried to call a chambermaid, but collapsed, falling against the washbasin next to his bed and shattering it, which gouged his head. It took three hours to get him to Bellevue Hospital. In an era before transfusions and antibiotics, he succumbed three days after his admittance at age 37. Here, Neil Young’s Americana album features a unique version Foster’s “Oh Susannah.”
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:14:07 +0000