Stephen C. Foster

Foster, circa 1860.

Stephen C. Foster (1826-64) was the biggest US songwriter of the middle 1800s. More than 150 years after he died in poverty, many of his songs are still well known in the US (links go to YouTube, subject to link rot):

• 1848: Oh! Susanna – the video has what it delicately calls the “original lyrics”
• 1850: Camptown Races – see Al Jolson perform it in blackface!
• 1851: Old Folks at Home – aka “Swanee River”, now the state song of Florida
• 1853: My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night – now the state song of Kentucky
• 1854: Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair
• 1864: Beautiful Dreamer

The first three are blackface minstrel songs.

Not from Alabama but Pennsylvania. His mother was from a slave-owning family in Maryland, but, despite what you might think from his songs, he never lived in the US South himself. He did go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans once, in 1852, and sometimes visited his rich cousins in Louisville, Kentucky, but he lived almost his whole life in or near the Northern cities of Pittsburgh, Cincinnatti and New York. He never saw the Suwannee River in Florida – except in the atlas he picked it out of.

His contact with actual Black people was limited too: mainly dockworkers in Cincinnati, where he worked for his brother’s shipping company as a bookkeeper.  His ideas about Black music and dialect seem to come mainly from Dan Rice, a White circus performer who performed in blackface (not to be confused with T. Daddy Rice of “Jump Jim Crow” fame).

Minstrelese: His average royalties on songs written in Standard English was $31. For those written in “Negro dialect” or minstrelese, N-word and all: $319.44. He preferred writing parlour music, meant for all those pianos the middle class bought as status symbols. He said minstrel music was “disreputable saloon music that was totally unfit for ladies and proper society”. But whenever he was in desperate straits – which was often, given his alcoholism and the narrow-minded greed of sheet-music publishers – he would whip out another blackface minstrel song that the US could not seem to get enough of. His songs sentimentalized the slave South at the height of the abolitionist movement to end slavery.

What US American legend would be complete without a beloved racist statue? Foster’s hometown of Pittsburgh erected this statue in his honour in 1900. It is still there, as of 2021, at Schenley Plaza, not far from Dippy the Diplodocus at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: When this book came out in 1852 it was a huge hit. For a while it even outsold Holy Scripture itself. It inspired Foster to write “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night”. He stripped out all the Uncle Tom references and changed the minstrelese to Standard English and named it “Old Kentucky Home, Good Night”.

His last years were a blur of cheap boarding houses and rum. He was no longer Stephen Foster but, as he put it, “the wreck of Stephen Foster”. Yet in his last two years he still managed to write 20 songs, which was average for him. Among them: “Beautiful Dreamer”.

He died on January 13th 1864 (not a Friday) with just 38 cents in his pocket – one for each year of his life.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: mainly “American Experience” on PBS (2001); “The Life and Times of Stephen Foster” (2004) by Susan Zannos; “The Birth of Blackface” on US History Scene (2019).

See also:

• 1851 in 9 songs
• minstrel show
  • blackface
  • minstrelese
  • Jump Jim Crow
• Standard English
• American abolitionists
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• The N-word
• “It was the times!”

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