Stephen Foster

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Stephen Foster · Stephen Collins Foster was born in 1826 in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, and is sometimes called the father of American music. He wrote more than two hundred songs, mainly parlour music and folk music from the Romantic period. As a child he taught himself to play the clarinet, drum, flute, guitar and piano. At thirteen he took lessons from the German music dealer Henry Kleber in Pittsburgh, with whom he studied works by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

Music and breakthrough

After his marriage in 1850 he wrote most of his best-known songs: Camptown Races and Nelly Bly in 1850, Old Folks at Home, also known as Swanee River, in 1851, My Old Kentucky Home in 1853 and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair in 1854. Oh! Susanna, Hard Times Come Again No More and Beautiful Dreamer are also his. Many of his songs were sung in the blackface minstrel shows that were popular in his day. Foster tried to make the lyrics more decent, but the genre was offensive to Black Americans even in his own time. After the early 1850s he wrote mainly parlour songs. Many songs have a Southern theme, but Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once.

Influence

He spent his last four years in New York. He fell ill, possibly fell in his hotel, and died in 1864, at the age of thirty-seven, in Bellevue Hospital. In his wallet was a note with the words Dear friends and gentle hearts. Many of his melodies remained popular, also in the twenty-first century, and form a foundation of the American song repertoire.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1986Beautiful Dreamer: Robert White sings Stephen Foster
• 1987Songs By Stephen Foster
• 1990The Great Sentimental Age
• 1994Stephen Foster Songs - Parlor & Minstrel Songs, Dance Tunes & Instrumentals
• 2007Ashokan Farewell / Beautiful Dreamer
• 2008American Classics: Foster: Songs / Griffes: The Rose of the Night / Copland: Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson
• 2020Songs
• ?Civil War Songs - Ballads, Patriotic Songs, Laments
• ?Stephen Foster Melodies

Mentioned in other articles

• Minstrel shows GenreThe minstrel show was also the first major form of popular entertainment in America: the banjo found its way into white music through these shows, songwriters such as Stephen Foster wrote for them, and after the Civil War Black performers appeared as well.