1826–1864 · United States · Romantic
Stephen Foster (1826–1864) was an American composer, poet and singer who wrote more than 200 songs to his own words. Among his songs are "Oh! Susanna", "Old Folks at Home" and "My Old Kentucky Home", and many of his works are still popular today. The site offers his songs for voice and piano and for guitar.
Stephen Collins Foster came into the world on 4 July 1826 at Lawrenceville in Pennsylvania, close to Pittsburgh, and the place is now a Pittsburgh district. Lawrenceville was full of newcomers from Europe, so Italian, German and Scots-Irish tunes were familiar to people there.
His musical gift showed early. His mother later remembered him as a boy marching around with a feather in his cap, beating a drum and whistling "Auld Lang Syne". As a child Stephen paid attention to the African American songs sung by Black slaves and by wandering entertainers; later this left a strong mark on his own work. He learned the clarinet, drums, flute, guitar and piano by himself. He was a good whistler and often whistled the tunes he composed.
In 1839 Stephen's brother William, who was an apprentice engineer in Towanda, felt that the boy should be looked after by Henry Kleber, who was born in Germany and sold music in Pittsburgh (1816–1897). Kleber introduced Stephen to composition, and the two of them studied works by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Weber, Beethoven and Mozart.
Stephen went to private academies at Towanda, Athens and Allegheny, all in Pennsylvania. His subjects included mathematics, Latin, Greek, the classics, English grammar, diction and penmanship. The Camptown races site, which gave one of Foster's best-known songs both its title and its setting, lay 48 km from Athens and 24 km from Towanda.
He also spent a short time at Jefferson College, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania; the college is today part of Washington & Jefferson College. His fees were covered, but he had little money to spend. Together with another student he left Canonsburg to visit Pittsburgh and did not come back.
Foster composed his first song, the "Tioga Waltz", at the age of 14. The first of his songs to appear in print was "Open thy Lattice Love" (1844).
In the 1840s Foster grew close to the minstrel theatre, where "Oh! Susanna" (1848) and "Camptown Races" (1850) were born. Many of his songs were performed in the minstrel shows that were so popular at the time. Foster sought to raise taste among refined people by writing words that suited them, in place of the poor-quality and truly offensive words found in some songs of this kind.
On 22 July 1850 Foster and Jane Denny McDowell were married. Their wedding trip took them to New York and Baltimore. Back in Pennsylvania he wrote most of the songs that made him famous: "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Dog Tray" (both 1853), "Old Folks at Home", also called "Swanee River" (1851), "Ring de Banjo" (1851) and "Nelly Bly" (1850). His wife Jane was the person for whom he wrote "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854).
Southern subjects run through many of Foster's songs, but he had never made his home in the South and went there on one occasion only. From the early 1850s minstrel numbers became rarer in his output, and his main interest shifted to parlour songs. The archive material that has survived gives no sign that Foster was an abolitionist.
Foster spent the last four years of his life in New York. Little is known about this time, although family letters have survived. For many years he lived in poverty, because he could not manage his already meagre income sensibly.
Foster fell ill with a fever in January 1864. Foster died in New York on 13 January 1864, and his grave is in Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh. "Beautiful Dreamer", one of his most loved pieces, appeared in print only after the author's death, in 1864.
Foster's life has been described in many biographies, which disagree on a good number of details. He wrote almost nothing about himself, and it is possible that his brother Morrison got rid of papers that he felt put the family in a bad light. After Stephen's death Morrison became his literary executor and replied to people asking for copies of manuscripts, autographs and facts about the composer's life.
Foster usually sent his handwritten scores straight to his publishers. The publishers kept them and passed them neither to libraries nor to his heirs. Some of the original manuscripts were later bought, and ended up in private collections and in the Library of Congress.
On the University of Pittsburgh campus stands the Stephen Foster Memorial, a building with the Stephen Foster museum, two theatres and a Center for American Music. It holds the biggest collection of Foster's original works, recordings and other keepsakes that his songs have brought forth around the world.
His name is given to two state parks, one in White Springs, Florida (the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center) and one in Georgia (Stephen C. Foster State Park); each stands on the Suwannee River. A bronze bust of Foster by Walker Hancock, added in 1940, stands at the Bronx's Hall of Fame for Great Americans. A seated statue of him looks over the Ohio River in Alms Park, Cincinnati. Every year, on the first weekend of July, the Lawrenceville Historical Society and the Allegheny Cemetery Historical Association hold "Doo Dah Days!", a festival of Foster's music and heritage. His house in Lawrenceville remains on Penn Avenue by the Stephen Foster Community Center.
The Stephen Foster Music Camp, a summer camp for music, takes place in Richmond, Kentucky, on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University. It has piano courses, a choir, an orchestra and a band.
Many early filmmakers chose Foster's songs for their work. Hollywood films include "Harmony Lane" (1935), "Swanee River" (1939) and "I Dream of Jeanie" (1952). In Japan two television series were made about the lives of Foster and Jane McDowell: the first in 1979 with 13 episodes, the second in 1992–1993 with 52 episodes. Both were named "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" after his song.
The number of Foster's songs is above 200; they are lyrical and romantic, and the words are his own. They include "Beautiful Dreamer", "Old Black Joe", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Swanee River" (that is, "Old Folks at Home"), "Camptown Races", "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Oh! Susanna" (1848). Many of them are still popular in the twenty-first century. Foster is known as "the father of American music", and he is remembered above all for the parlour and folk music of the Romantic period.
In his songs Foster combined African American music with sentimental romances and ballads. Some of his songs were sung in white families, for example "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854); others, including the religious chants of Black congregations, were sung in Black communities, for example "Old Folks at Home" (1851) and "Old Black Joe" (1860). "My Old Kentucky Home" is the official song of the state of Kentucky, and "Old Folks at Home" is the official song of Florida.
Besides songs for the minstrel stage and the parlour, Foster wrote drinking songs and temperance songs, and also church hymns, although by 1910 they were no longer included in hymnals. His lesser-known works include hymns for Sunday schools. For flute and guitar he arranged many pieces by Schubert, Weber, Lanner, Donizetti, Beethoven and Mozart. His songs, in both words and tunes, were often changed by publishers and singers. Ives, Copland, Poulenc, Gould, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Vaughan Williams often used Foster's works as folk material.
Other musicians have also written songs about Foster and from his music: in 1970 Gordon Lightfoot wrote "Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)", Neil Sedaka put a song about Foster on his 1975 album "The Hungry Years", and in 1998 the band Squirrel Nut Zippers recorded "The Ghost of Stephen Foster". On his album "12 Songs" (1970) Randy Newman included "Old Kentucky Home", which is built on Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!".
The site has three Foster editions. "The Old Folks At Home (Swanee River)" is for solo guitar, at intermediate level. "Slumber My Darling" and "Hard Times Come Again No More" are for voice and piano, at intermediate-plus level. You can begin with them in this order.