Stephen Foster

Stephen Collins Foster, born on July 4, 1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, was an American composer of the Romantic period whose output of more than 200 songs earned him the designation "the father of American music." His Broadway credits include the musical Susanna, Don't You Cry. Foster died on January 13, 1864, at age 37, in Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

Foster was the son of William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson Foster, both of Ulster Scots and English descent, and grew up as the youngest of ten children. He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, where his studies covered English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He also spent a brief period at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, now part of Washington and Jefferson College, before departing without completing his studies. A self-taught musician, Foster learned to play the clarinet, guitar, flute, and piano. Through the influence of German-born Pittsburgh music dealer Henry Kleber, he was introduced to music composition and studied the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schubert.

Foster composed his first song, the "Tioga Waltz," at age 14, and his first published song was "Open thy Lattice Love" in 1844. He married Jane Denny McDowell on July 22, 1850, and following their honeymoon in New York and Baltimore, he returned to Pennsylvania and produced many of his most enduring works. These included "Camptown Races" and "Nelly Bly" in 1850, "Ring de Banjo" and "Old Folks at Home" in 1851, "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Dog Tray" in 1853, and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" in 1854, the last written for his wife Jane. He also arranged works by Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Lanner, Weber, and Schubert for flute and guitar, and authored numerous church hymns, though their inclusion in hymnals had ceased by 1910.

A number of Foster's songs were written for the blackface minstrel shows that were popular during his lifetime, though his output of minstrel material declined after the early 1850s as he shifted his focus primarily to parlor music. Despite the Southern themes prevalent in many of his compositions, Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon. He also wrote songs on the subject of drinking, including "My Wife Is a Most Knowing Woman" and "When the Bowl Goes Round," alongside temperance songs such as "Comrades Fill No Glass for Me."

Foster spent his final four years in New York City. In January 1864, he became ill with a fever and was found by his writing partner George Cooper lying in a pool of blood in his hotel in the Bowery, having sustained a cut to his neck. He died three days later at Bellevue Hospital. His leather wallet contained 37 cents in Civil War scrip, three pennies, and a scrap of paper reading "Dear friends and gentle hearts." Historian JoAnne O'Connell, in her biography The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster, speculates that Foster may have taken his own life, a view also considered by musicologist Ken Emerson in his 2010 work Stephen Foster and Co., which describes the injuries as possibly "accidental or self-inflicted." Foster was buried in the Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Following his death, his brother Morrison Foster served as his literary executor, and "Beautiful Dreamer" was published posthumously in 1864.

Foster's songs have had a lasting presence in American culture. "My Old Kentucky Home" was adopted as the official state song of Kentucky by the General Assembly on March 19, 1928. "Old Folks at Home," also known as "Swanee River," was designated the official state song of Florida in 1935. In 1957, Ray Charles released a version of the song titled "Swanee River Rock (Talkin' Bout That River)," which became his first pop hit that November. A published collection of 40 of Foster's songs, Stephen Foster Song Book: Original Sheet Music of 40 Songs, was edited by musicologist Richard Jackson and published by Dover Publications in 1974. The note found in Foster's wallet is said to have inspired Bob Hilliard's lyric for the 1949 song "Dear Hearts and Gentle People."