Stephen Foster and His Influence on 19th Century Music

by William Chapman

One of the most influential people in 19th century American music is Stephen Foster. Along with Daniel Emmett, Dan Rice, Joel Walker Sweeney, and many others, Stephen Foster wrote and performed songs that were loved all over the country. His songs would be played on plantations, in dirty roadside inns, on Mississippi River steamboats, and by the light of countless army bivouac fires.

Foster was born on Independance Day in 1826 in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. It was on the same day, in the evening, that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both passed away. He grew up in a poor household with nine siblings and an alcoholic father. Stephen's oldest sister, Charlotte, was already talanted pianist by the time of Stephen's birth. In 1829, Charlotte died of Malaria in Louisville, Kentucky. Her death as well as several other events added to the unhappiness of Stephen's childhood.

Foster's teenage years proved to be happier than his earlier ones. He started taking classical music lessons from a German immigrant named Henry Kleber, who owned a music store in Pittsburg. Foster learned to play the flute at Athens Academy and later performed his first composition on it in Athens, Pennsylvania. Also, in 1833, his father got involved in the temperance movement and took an oath to stop drinking.

During Stephen Foster's adolescent years, a new form of music was becoming popular in the United States. It was called minstrel music. Based on flamboyant and often insulting parodies of Southern lower class white and black culture, minstrel music began to become a popular phenomenon. Joel Walker Sweeney, who is credited with the invention of the five string banjo, performed and wrote many minstrel songs and traveled all over the country performing them. Sweeney and his group, the Virginia Minstrels, performed in blackface, which was a kind of performance where whites dressed up as blacks by rubbing burnt cork on themselves and performed cheerful songs with exaggerated accents. Not all minstrel musicians performed in blackface, but it was quite common. This form of music and performance grew to be extremely popular in the 1830's and 1840's.

In the meantime, Stephen was beginning to make a living on his own. He got a job as a bookkeeper in his brother's merchant firm. For his new job, Foster moved to Cincinatti, Ohio. It was in Cincinatti that Foster wrote "Oh! Susanna", one of his most famous songs. The year was 1847. The song was first performed at Andrew's Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh. The song was almost an instant hit.

In the next six years, Foster published four more hit songs: Nelly Was a Lady, Camptown Races, Old Folks at Home, and My old Kentucky Home. Despite Foster's success, he felt that his songs were being misunderstood. Foster was different from many minstrel tune writers in that he did not intend to mock slaves in his songs. True, he did write several of his songs in the lyrical style of minstrel songs, but they were not intended to be mocking or hurtful. Foster even went so far as to describe other minstrel songs as "trashy and offensive." Nonetheless, Foster's songs were performed in minstrel shows all over the country.

Stephen moved to New York in 1860 with his wife Jane and their daughter Marion. By 1862, Foster's songwriting had begun to go downhill. The North and the South had split and his country was torn by war. Foster would not live to see the end of the war. He turned to alcoholism and died in Bellvue Hospital in New York City in 1864. Foster is still misunderstood to this day. It is a common belief that Foster was a Southerner. However, Foster only visited the deep South once and he spent most of his life living in Northern states. He advocated Northern political views and showed true compassion for the slaves, unlike many minstrel songwriters of his day.

That is what made Stephen Foster stand out. He wrote beloved and lasting songs, but all of them were tasteful. That is why Foster's songs have lasted so long. While other songs faded away when peoples' opinions changed, Foster's songs remained beloved favorites. That was his contrribution to American music.

Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/timeline/timeline2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Foster

Comments

[Sandy]

Excellent post! I love Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races and My Old Kentucky Home. So sad that such talent was gone so early.

[william]

Thanks!