This is a version of Atlantic Every day, a magazine that guides you through the top stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Register here.
Two hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: songwriter Stephen Foster.
The timing is appropriate, as Foster is an American protagonist. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music is still great. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” are still popular, even if many think they are folk songs. Foster successfully invented the idea of a professional songwriter; invented the American songbook and introduced the current structure of the chorus line; and promote music intellectual property law. His sudden death set the template for the doomed, no-nonsense musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?
Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the passion nor the ability to do business or other things, but he did manage to get writing songs, often for singing bands or to be sold as sheet music. “What he had was his ability to create rhymes and melodies and put them together,” Deane L. Root, professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. In doing so, he created a model for the great songwriters who have followed—Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville’s Music Row, and modern hitmakers such as Max Martin.
Guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster’s music since the early 1990s and even named the group “Beautiful Dreamers” after Foster’s compositions, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. “It’s just a perfect example of what a song and a song form can be,” he told me. “There are a million other composers, but if I just think of the pop-song genre, in this way it seems like ground zero for a lot of the stuff we have now.” Frisell recorded “Hard Times” as both a rollicking swing tune and a sad sadwhich he said is evidence of the song’s craftsmanship. “That rhythm goes deep inside you. It’s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of a tree, and then you can start climbing up there.”
Musical skill, then, was not enough to ensure financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a big hit with “Oh! Susanna” in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to make a modest living, making $10 to $15 a song — $400 to $500 today. “He didn’t have an agent, he didn’t have a lawyer who could do this for him. He didn’t have someone who knew the business on his behalf, writing contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,” Root said. Foster died in poverty in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in a hotel bathroom on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to the story, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.
Foster’s songs became ubiquitous—people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime—and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became more famous only after his death, thanks to a strong effort to build a reputation with his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a role model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others founded ASCAP, now the leading performing rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.
Talking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he was going to sleep the night before we talked, thinking how difficult it was to discuss. The most popular music of the era was the mistrals, which, as musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Ruled the World“presented a version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.” White musicians would sell Black culture (eg continues in popular music) or else make extreme exceptions. Many of Foster’s songs were written for Christy’s Minstrels, a prominent black minstrels of the 1840s and 1850s, and their songs contained slurs, pro-Union sentiments, and revisions to the horrors of slavery, even though he himself had witnessed it. (Foster’s personal politics are hard to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and seems more interested in getting paid.)
“My Old Kentucky Home” is the state song of the Commonwealth, and is the theme song of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the grief of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass credited the song with evoking abolitionist sentiment. Yet the words also include a slur that was cleaned up in 1986—too late. Some of the many Looney Tunes segments featuring his music were later removed from circulation due to their offensive material. But legendary Black bass-baritone and civil rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” in its raw form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.
Musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American song, told me that discussing Foster’s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. “I don’t know if he was more racist than the average person” of his time, he said. “He was just trying to make money.” He finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than what he was as an individual.
For May concert at Carnegie Hallpart of the nation’s 250th anniversary, he closed the set with “Hard Times.” Giddens doesn’t do much of Foster’s music, looking to focus on a lesser-known work, but decided it was the right piece for now. For me and for many othersis Foster’s best work. This song is untainted by dialect, has a memorable melody and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a help in difficult times of late. Regardless of Foster’s flaws with his music, Giddens said, “The man could write a song.” When he and his backing band played “Hard Times,” it brought the house down, just as it has for 170 years now.
Related:
Here are three new stories from Atlantic:
Today’s news
- Russia hit Kyiv close 500 drones in a massive attack last night which killed at least 21 people and injured 85 others, according to the city’s mayor.
- At least 2,295 people have been confirmed dead in the Venezuela earthquakeand almost 50,000 people are missing.
- United States Olympian was charged with property damage after being arrested for allegedly touching a piece of detached coating at the Reflecting Pool last month. The Olympian says he did not remove or damage any coatings.
More From Atlantic
Cultural Breakdown
Debate. Film critic a new book attacks the way for the decline of culture. David Thomson has rarely been more wrongMichael O’Donnell argues.
Investigate. The Internet couldn’t get enough of “Freddy,” the German tourist on the World Cup’s epic tour, writes Will Oremus. Why did he suddenly become silent?
PS
Although Foster’s fame grew in the decades after his death, Atlantic readers (then as now) would be better informed. In 1867, three years after his death, the newspaper published a memorial by Robert P. Nevinwho knew Foster from Pittsburgh. Nevin remembered the songwriter as a master of depression, and emphasized that Foster not only characterized Black Americans but used their vernacular to convey universal themes. “Time will be far in the future before lips fail to move to its music, or hearts to respond to its influence,” Nevin wrote. That time has not yet come.
– David
Stephanie Bai contributed to this journal.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for your support Atlantic.
