Stephen Collins Foster

American composer

• Born: July 4, 1826
• Birthplace: Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 13, 1864
• Place of death: New York, New York

Working within the most popular, sometimes vulgar, musical style of the day, Foster wrote works of unaffected simplicity and melodic beauty that became among the finest representatives of the American folk song.

Early Life

In one of history’s notable small coincidences, Stephen Collins Foster—who would become known as “America’s Troubadour”—was born precisely fifty years after the day on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and on the same day that the Founders Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. The ninth child of William and Eliza Collins, “Stephy,” as he was sometimes called, was the baby of the family, nurtured in a warm and loving environment. His father, one of the pioneers in the establishment of Pittsburgh as a thriving “Western” city, was a middle-class businessperson, would-be entrepreneur, and minor public official whose fortunes were always tottering between solvency and indigence, a condition that would carry over into Stephen’s own later life.

Tutored first by his older sisters, Foster was educated at a number of private academies in and around Pittsburgh and in Towanda in northern Pennsylvania. Gentle, sensitive, and often pensive, he was never the scholar, and he chafed under the discipline of academic life. His only real interest was in music, a subject that he studied on his own and for which he early showed a rare ability. Even his father, who wished a business career for his youngest son, could not help but observe the boy’s “strange talent.” Family anecdotes describe the seven-year-old boy as picking up a flute for the first time and in a few minutes playing “Hail Columbia” and of his teaching himself to play the piano. Sent to Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Foster dropped out after a week, homesick, and returned to his family in the summer of 1841.

Over the next few years, Foster lived at home, visiting relatives with his mother and occasionally attending theatrical events and concerts with his favorite brother, Morrison, his first official biographer. During this tranquil period, Foster became increasingly absorbed in his music. In December, 1844, he published his first composition, the music to a poem, “Open Thy Lattice, Love.” Derivative and harmonically awkward, the song was a creditable piece of work for a boy of sixteen and already bore the naturalness that was to be its composer’s trademark.

Life’s Work

Home life was thus somehow a catalyst to Foster’s inspiration. Even after the publication of his first song, Foster continued living with his family despite efforts on their part to find him some employment. “Stephy” was always the dreamer, though the only photograph of him, taken years later when he had become famous, shows a strong face, with prominent brow, large, dark eyes, and full, almost pouting lips.

In 1845, Foster joined the Knights of S.T., a club of young men who met twice weekly at the Foster home. The members wrote verses and sang popular songs of the day. Membership in this club was probably crucial in determining Foster’s career, for it provided the young composer with both a ready audience for his work and a further source of inspiration. Through the club, he came into contact with examples of the minstrel song, or, as it was then called, the “Ethiopian” melody.

Additionally, the minstrel show was just coming into its prime as a popular American form of entertainment. Pittsburgh, in fact, had, in the fall of 1830, been the scene of one of the earliest minstrel shows when a twenty-two-year-old Thomas “Daddy” Rice, the “father” of American minstrelsy, first put on blackface and cavorted on the stage as Jim Crow, a good-humored, illiterate black man. Whether Foster had seen this first performance is uncertain, but it is clear that by the 1840’s he had become friends with Daddy Rice and had submitted to him a number of pieces in the minstrel style, which Rice politely refused.

Foster kept composing, however, and the Knights kept singing his songs “in almost every parlor in Pittsburgh,” so that by 1847 Foster’s songs were being circulated largely from singer to singer, a fact that explains their success as authentic creations of a basically oral folk culture rather than as products of a formal musical tradition. Emerging from this oral culture was the first of his great songs. “Oh! Susanna,” a nonsense song in the American minstrel manner, was first sung in Andrews’s Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh in September, 1847, though it was not published until the following year.

“Oh! Susanna” made Foster famous, not only because minstrel companies all over the country appropriated it and publishers and other songwriters altered and rearranged it, but also because thousands of pioneers carried the song along with their hopes to the goldfields of California.

Curiously, Foster was at first somewhat blasé about payment for his early work. In a letter dated 1849, for example, he mentions that he gave manuscript copies of “Oh! Susanna” to “several persons” before submitting a copy to W. C. Peters for publication. Scores of pirated editions of this and later songs point out the laxity in those days with regard to copyrights, but it is clear also that Foster at first regarded songwriting as a questionable occupation for a gentleman. The fact that he was at least partially embarrassed by or indifferent to fame as a songwriter is evident in the fact that he gave permission to the famous minstrel impresario Edwin P. Christy to perform and publish his “Old Folks at Home”—popularly known as “Swanee River”—as Christy’s own. In return, Foster was paid fifteen dollars and was encouraged to submit further work.

Foster’s association with Christy, in fact, was crucial to his career. The Christy Minstrels were among the most popular theatrical troupes before the Civil War, and Foster’s connection with Christy assured him of both a steady income and a ready market. Christy’s Minstrels performed all over the country, transmitting Foster’s songs orally months before they were ever published.

The early 1850’s were Foster’s most prolific period and the happiest of his life. In July, 1850, he had married Jane McDowell, daughter of an eminent Pittsburgh physician who had treated Charles Dickens on his stopover in Pittsburgh during his famous American tour during the 1840’s.

Always close to his family, Foster took his young wife to live with his parents, and once again the surroundings of familial love and contentment fueled his creative powers. Often locking himself in his study for hours—a labor that belied the spontaneity of the finished compositions—he produced dozens of his best songs during the next two or three years, securing Firth and Pond of New York as his principal publisher. During this period, Foster composed “Camptown Races” (1850), “Ring de Banjo” (1851), “Old Folks at Home” (1851), “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground” (1852), “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854)—inspired by his wife—and “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” (1855), all masterpieces that have never lost popular appeal and that have secured for their composer a preeminent place in nineteenth century American music.

The year 1855 marked a turning point in Foster’s life and career. At the peak of his fame and at the height of his creative powers, Foster could now command unusual prerogatives from his publishers, one of which was to prove disastrous. He was temperamentally unfit for the plodding routine of the businessperson, but songwriting was a joy, and he soon convinced himself that he could live comfortably on his potential as a composer. In effect, Foster pawned his future for a secure present. He developed the practice of drawing advances from his publishers, selling outright all future royalties from his published songs. As soon as a song was printed, he would calculate its future value and sell its royalties.

Living thus beyond his means, and having to write songs to live, Foster composed over the next few years scores of works, most of which were markedly inferior to his early material. “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” was written in 1855, but not until 1860, with “Old Black Joe,” did he write a song with the powerful simplicity of his best work. In between were temperance songs and sentimental ballads, the spontaneous gaiety of his minstrel style all but gone. Not unexpectedly, Foster was experiencing domestic problems as well. His relationship with Jane became strained, and on several occasions the couple separated because of Foster’s inability to support her.

By the advent of the Civil War in 1860, Foster had moved to New York City to be nearer his publishers. From this time on, he became a sort of song factory, churning out to order virtual potboilers for a public eager to hear anything new from him. Deeper in debt, he produced work that was facile, commercial, and dull: saccharine hymns, topical comic pieces, patriotic war songs, and the usual sentimental ballads of mother, home, and sloe-eyed love. Little of this work is of any importance in the canon of Foster’s songs. It represents, rather, a pitiful decline in his art and fortunes.

Eventually, Foster received less and less for his work—work that he must have sensed was inferior to his earlier compositions. He began drinking heavily, getting steadily weaker and falling into states of depression. Poor and in ill health, Foster was taken to Bellevue Hospital in January, 1864, where he died three days later. Found in his pockets were a few scraps of paper and a few coins totaling thirty-eight cents. In March of that year, a last great song was published from among his final papers. Called “Beautiful Dreamer,” it was a final return to the gentle lyricism and honesty of his greatest work.

Significance

It is ironic that the man whose music is richly evocative of the Old South never traveled below the Mason-Dixon line. Such irony suggests the most telling characteristic of Foster as a composer—his instinctive, unschooled, spontaneous lyricism. Foster was a self-taught composer whose lack of formal, technical knowledge of the rules of composition hampered the success of his instrumental pieces, his dozen or so attempts to write “serious” music. For simple, unaffected melody, however—for “parlor” songs sung by respectable, middle-class folks—Foster’s songs are unsurpassed among the works of nineteenth century composers.

Though at first reluctant, Foster steadfastly held to his commitment to become the best of the “Ethiopian” melodists. He produced songs that in effect reformed the American minstrel style. His best work bore none of the vulgarity common to the minstrel show; there was no coarseness, no crudity even in his nonsense and comic songs. His work reveals the honest, homespun simplicity that was the strength of the oral folk tradition.

Bibliography

Emerson, Ken. Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Well-researched and documented biography, examining Foster’s life and music within the context of events and personalities of his era. Emerson describes the combination of racism and genuine compassion for African Americans that are reflected in Foster’s songs.

Foster, Morrison. My Brother Stephen. Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1932. A brief account of Foster’s life, particularly his relationship with his family. Not totally objective, it ignores much of the less flattering aspects of Foster’s life and character but does provide, as the earliest biography, some important information about his music.

Howard, John Tasker. Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962. The definitive biography, well researched and unbiased. Drawing almost too minutely on private collections of Foster material, including family papers, Howard recounts Foster’s schooling, travel, relationships, and financial habits. A thorough appendix includes a complete list of Foster’s compositions.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lott analyzes the complex racial meaning of minstrelsy, arguing that to white working-class audiences, blackface entertainment expressed their paradoxical admiration and contempt, envy and fear, of African Americans. He focuses on Foster’s music in chapter 7, “California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American, 1848.”

Milligan, Harold Vincent. Stephen Collins Foster: A Biography of America’s Folk-Song Composer. New York: G. Schirmir, 1920. The first objective biography. Pays particular attention to Foster’s early life and to what its author perceives as a major drawback to Foster’s cultivation of serious musical taste. Also treats Foster’s final days and his undramatic death.

Walters, Raymond. Stephen Foster, Youth’s Golden Gleam: A Sketch of His Life and Background in Cincinnati, 1846-1850. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1936. Treats a period of Foster’s life while the composer was a bookkeeper for his brother, Dunning. Suggests that the Cincinnati waterfront, with its wharves and its black music, was a profound influence on Foster’s creative achievements. Both Howard and Milligan (see above) also discuss this period, though both regard it as somewhat “sketchy.”

Wittke, Carl. Tambo and Bones. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930. An accurate and entertaining history of the American minstrel show, the book provides a clear perspective through which to appreciate Foster’s success and his contribution to American music.