Pittsburgh, beloved songs like “Hard Times Come
Transcript of Pittsburgh, beloved songs like “Hard Times Come
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Stephen Foster has been described as many things over the years, among them a folk songwriter, a popular songwriter, and an American songwriter. But what many people
forget is that he was first and foremost a Pittsburgh songwriter. Without the ethnically diverse population, commerce, heritage, and industry of 19th-century Pittsburgh, beloved songs like “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Camptown Races,” and “Oh, Susanna” might never have existed.
SBy Kathryn Miller Haines
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While modern audiences question
Foster’s position towards African Americans
based on some of his lyrics using exaggerated
dialog, a closer look reveals his compassion for
blacks, fostered right here at home. Stephen
Foster was indeed a product of his time and
place; Pittsburgh’s unique history and culture
before, during, and after Foster’s lifetime
shaped the content of his work and prolonged
the life of his musical legacy.
Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh was a
microcosm of the industrial landscape of
the rest of the United States. Dubbed the
“Birmingham of America” by none other than
Charles Dickens, Pittsburgh was an established
manufacturer of iron, glass, steam engines,
and steamboats at the time of Stephen Foster’s
birth in 1826.1 The city was already wrapped
in a heavy pall of coal dust that remained
part of its image well into the 1970s. While
factories did not make as overt appearances in
Foster’s work as they did in Dickens’ novels,
Pittsburgh’s industry emerged again and again
in Foster’s music, from the steamship in “The
Glendy Burk” (“The smoke goes up and the
engine roars, And the wheel goes round and
round”), to the allusion to mill and factory
workers alike left frail and fainting at the door
thanks to long, unregulated hours in “Hard
Times Come Again No More.”
It was not just heavy industry that lined
Pittsburgh’s waterways. The same three rivers
that made it a valued defensive outpost during
the French & Indian War had come to serve
cotton mills that seemed better suited to the
South. The mills—along with the riverboats
and packets used to transport raw cotton to
the city—provided young Stephen Foster with
a glimpse of the lives and customs of enslaved
African Americans and other dock workers.
The mix of people and dialects would ignite
in his mind complex questions about race and
inspire characters in some of his most beloved
songs. Most of all, Foster did not just observe
the mills and workers from afar; his first job
was sweeping the floor at Pittsburgh’s Hope
Cotton Mill.2
The city was a welcome port for
workers and travelers and as such it grew
to accommodate the needs of visitors by
providing a wide range of entertainment that
would have been expected in Manhattan,
but not at the edge of the frontier. The first
freestanding theater opened in Pittsburgh in
1813.3 By the 1860s, Pittsburgh had several
dedicated playhouses, 25 stages, a myriad
of concert saloons, and four
assembly halls.4 While during
Foster’s formative years the
performance opportunities were
not quite so numerous, the city
was home to venues that welcomed
touring circuses, theater companies,
and big name actors like Edwin
Booth and opera impresarios like
Henry Russell who made the city a
destination on their way to New York
via river, canal, and eventually, rail.5
For a young boy in a relatively small
city, this exposure to entertainments of
the highest order not only shaped his
own work (Foster parodied Russell in his
1851 song “Farewell, Old Cottage”), but
made talent of that magnitude seem like
something within his reach. He did not
have to stay a regional songwriter any more
than the people of Pittsburgh had to restrict
themselves to regional talents.
Of course the form of entertainment
that had the biggest impact on Foster’s
career, and creates the greatest controversy
when appraising the composer today, was the
minstrel show. These performances featured
white men donning black face and aping
African American men and women, as well
as creating caricatures of Irish and German
immigrants and the perceived differences
between high and low classes. While one might
assume that the minstrel show was conceived in
the antebellum South, it was actually born and
nurtured in the most rapidly industrializing
regions in America: the Northeast and the
Ohio River Valley. Foster was exposed to these
shows quite early in his life—white men were
parodying black men in public performances
in the U.S. as early as 1815.6 By attending these
shows, and participating in amateur versions
himself, he learned several things that could
eventually be applied to his own career: the
tropes and themes that made a minstrel song
successful, the troupes and performers who
achieved the greatest level of success, and the
value of having one’s work associated with
The mix of people and dialects would ignite in his mind
complex questions about race and inspire characters in some
of his most beloved songs.
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The original of this Stephen Foster portrait, showing him late in life, measures only 1.2 inches high.University of Pittsburgh Library System,
Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.
such a popular form of entertainment.7 The
impact of these lessons became apparent
years later in his dealings with E.P. Christy,
the leader of The Christy Minstrels, the most
popular minstrel troupe of the day. In an 1851
letter, Foster wrote to Christy:I have just received a letter from Mess.
Firth, Pond & Co., stating that they have
copy-righted a new song of mine (“Oh!
Boys, carry me ‘long”) but will not be
able to issue it for some little time yet,
owing to other engagements. This will
give me time to send you the m.s. and
allow you the privilege of singing it
for at least two weeks, and probably a
month before it is issued, or before any
other band gets it… This song is certain
to become popular, as I have taken great
pains with it. If you accept my proposi-
tion I will make it a point to notify you
hereafter when I have a new song and
send you the m.s. on the same terms,
reserving to suit myself in all cases the
exclusive privilege of publishing. Thus
it will become notorious that your band
bring out all the new songs. You can
state in the papers that this song was
composed expressly for you.8
It is the South we think of when we hear
minstrel songs like “My Old Kentucky Home”
and “Old Folks at Home” (state songs for
Kentucky and Florida, respectively), but while
that geography is evoked, it is the freed slave’s
experiences that Foster captures as he writes
about a plantation life that is now “far, far
away,” and about loved ones who were left
behind to toil while the speaker escaped in
hopes of finding a better life. Being situated in a
Northern state may have also inspired Foster’s
desire to humanize his black characters, as he
gradually eschewed stereotyped dialect, and
crafted men and women of color who were
intended to be empathized with, rather than
crude caricatures held at a distance by the
audience. He expressed such sentiments in a
May 25, 1852, letter to Christy:As I once intimated to you, I had the
intention of omitting my name on my
Ethiopian songs, owing to the preju-
dice against them by some, which
might injure my reputation as writer of
Broadside displaying the lyrics of “Hard Times Come Again No More.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music,
Foster Hall Collection.
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another style of music, but I find that
by my efforts I have done a great deal
to build up a taste for the Ethiopian
songs among refined people by making
the words suitable to their taste, instead
of the trashy and really offensive words
which belong to songs of that order.9
Easy access to transportation not only
allowed Foster to encounter people from other
regions, it also made it easier to obtain goods
that otherwise might not have been introduced
into the region until years later. By the time
Charles Rosenbaum began manufacturing
pianofortes in Pittsburgh in 1815, the first
piano had already crossed the Alleghenies.10
To a young Stephen Foster, the instrument,
still foreign in so many regions of the U.S.,
seemed ubiquitous and exposed him to tools
that may not have been available in other areas
of the country. In fact, by 1841, when Stephen
was barely in his teens, his father, William
Barclay Foster, was already describing Foster’s
near obsession with music, writing, “his leisure
hours are all devoted to musick, for which he
possesses a strange talent.”11
It is the people who make a city and so
it was the people who shaped Pittsburgh who
had such a strong influence on Foster’s music.
Many of the early German and English settlers
of Pittsburgh were accomplished classical
musicians who passed on their skills to the
children of pioneers. The utopian Harmony
Society near Zelienople established one of the
first orchestras in the U.S., which was said to
have performed the first symphony composed
west of the Alleghenies.12 In the 1820s and ’30s,
musician immigrants like Henry Kleber and
W.C. Peters opened music stores in the city.13
And by 1844, when Foster was almost finished
with his own secondary education, Pittsburgh
became the first public school district in
Pennsylvania and the fifth in the country to
institute required music education.14 For a boy
who struggled to balance what was expected of
him with his desire to pursue the arts (while
away at school, he made a promise in a letter
to his eldest brother that he would not “pay
any attention to my music until after eight
Oclock in the evening”), he didn’t have to look
far to learn that music, while not an income-
boosting pursuit, was socially valuable.15
The immigrant influence did not just
shape Pittsburgh’s musical community; it
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Sheet music cover lithograph of the Christy Minstrels in costume, 1848.University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music,Foster Hall Collection.
Sheet music cover for Foster’s “We Are Coming Father Abra’am, 300,000 More.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.
Charlotte Susanna Fosterby James M. Edwards, Trustee, Allegheny Cemetery
In a shady vale of Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville is
the William Barclay Foster family plot with the gravesite
of America’s pioneering songwriter, Stephen Foster. “Oh!
Susanna,” America’s best-selling sheet music in the nineteenth
century, stands out as his greatest hit. First performed in 1847 at the
Eagle Ice Cream Saloon on Wood Street downtown, it became an instant
hit among minstrel performers nationwide. A few years later, the song
was cherished worldwide.
Who was Susanna? No one knows for sure and Foster didn’t say.
The lyrics are examined at length in Ken Emerson’s 1997 biography
Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture.
Emerson states clearly that Susanna is none other than Stephen’s sister,
Charlotte Susanna Foster.
Stephen was born into a large and bustling family. Charlotte,
17 years older, had a profound effect on young Stephen: she had an
exceptional singing voice, she played the family piano, and she sang the
first songs Stephen ever heard.
When she was 20, Charlotte travelled down the Ohio River to
Louisville to visit relatives and spend the summer. She contracted what
was probably malaria and died before she could be brought home.
A witness said she sang a song the morning of her death. She was
buried in Louisville, but two decades later—in 1852, four years after
“Oh! Susanna” had swept the nation—her remains were exhumed
and brought back to the family plot. Brother and sister are once again
together, she one row deeper and four graves east of Stephen himself,
the stone almost hidden in the lush sod:
CHARLOTTE SUSANNA FOSTERBORN DECEMBER 14, 1809
DIED IN LOUISVILLE OCTOBER 20, 1829HER REMAINS WERE REMOVED AND RE-INTERRED
BENEATH THIS STONE SEPTEMBER 10, 1852
promoter of the 19th century.18 Foster
dedicated his piano piece “The Village Bells
Polka” to Kleber, and included arrangements
of four Kleber songs in his Social Orchestra.
Kleber even provided the music for Foster’s
funeral. Foster’s brother, Morrison, admitted
in his biography, amidst claims that his
brother learned to play the flute unaided and
could pick out harmonies on the guitar at
two years old, that Kleber was his brother’s
tutor. Strangely, Kleber never claimed credit
for serving as Foster’s music instructor despite
their obvious affection for each other.
It was not Pittsburgh alone that provided
young Stephen Foster with an opportunity to
experience music. The city’s riverboats and rails
can be felt in the slow, mazurka-like tempo
of Foster’s temperance song “Comrades,
Fill No Glass for Me,” the polka beat in
“Oh, Susanna,” the Italian-melody inspired
“Beautiful Dreamer” and Foster’s many lyrical
and melodic allusions to the work of Irishman
Thomas Moore, most evident in his “Jeanie
with the Light Brown Hair.” Foster studied the
immigrant groups he heard around him and
borrowed from their musical styles with the
intent of appealing to a wide audience.16 More
directly, despite family claims that Foster was
an “untutored genius,” his relationship with
Henry Kleber cannot be denied.17 Kleber was
Pittsburgh’s best-known musical performer,
composer, merchant, teacher, and concert
allowed easy passage to towns like Cincinnati,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, of course,
New York, where music publishers were
rapidly growing thanks to new technologies.
Although evidence of such trips is limited,
steamship travel may have allowed Foster,
like his mother and sisters, to travel south to
Kentucky where he witnessed plantation life
firsthand.19 We know Foster took advantage
of opportunities to travel around the
country. Foster moved to Cincinnati in
1846 to work as a bookkeeper for his
brother, Dunning.20 During his three
years there, his first minstrel songs
took off in popularity; he signed a
professional agreement with the
Photo by James M. Edwards.
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It is the people who make a city and so it was the people who shaped
Pittsburgh who had such a strong influence
on Foster’s music.
music publishers Firth, Pond & Co. of New
York and F.D. Benteen of Baltimore; and
gained enough confidence in his songwriting
abilities that upon his return to Pittsburgh,
he rented an office and piano and became a
full-time songwriter. Later, Foster moved to
Hoboken, New Jersey, and then across the
Hudson to New York City itself to be closer
to his publishers and the frenetic music scene
there.21 Without this easy access to professional
resources and distribution, Foster may
have remained a hobbyist rather than a
professional composer.
Politics, too, flourished in Pittsburgh
in unique ways. Perhaps because of its large
African American community, Pittsburgh
became the center for abolitionist activity
in Pennsylvania, encouraging visits by such
luminaries of the movement as William Lloyd
Garrison and Frederick Douglass.22 One of
Stephen’s closest friends, the poet Charles P.
Shiras, edited The Albatross, one of several
abolitionist newspapers in Pittsburgh, and
authored a volume of poetry that criticized
the treatment of labor and the conditions
of Pittsburgh’s mills. His ideals must have
impacted Foster, whose own family consisted
of ardent Democrats, the party that was, at
the time, supportive of maintaining the status
quo, including slavery.23
Both president-elect Abraham Lincoln
and the newly elected provisional Confederacy
president, Jefferson Davis, made stops in
Pittsburgh shortly after being voted into
office.24 In his brief remarks the day after
his arrival in the city, Lincoln said no words
of praise were necessary about Allegheny
County, “as it was already widely known as the
‘banner county’ of the State, if not of the whole
Union.”25 Despite the huge crowds that turned
out to hear Lincoln in the rain, Pittsburgh was
actually a politically divisive town. While the
city and Allegheny County voters strongly
backed Republicans in gubernatorial and
presidential races, the region had plenty of
Democrats, like the Fosters, who sympathized
with the Southern cause. Stephen Foster’s
admiration for Lincoln cannot be denied,
however. While there’s no evidence Foster
was in the rain-soaked crowd during Lincoln’s
inaugural tour, his arrangement of “We are
Coming Father Abra’am, 300,000 More”
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Henry Kleber, Pittsburgh’s best-known musician of the 19th century.HHC Detre L&A, Oversize Print Collection.
speaks to his commitment to Lincoln’s cause.
Foster’s “Better Days are Coming” further
cements his admiration for the Union with
lyrics like, “There are voices of hope that are
borne on the air, And our land will be freed
from its clouds of despair, For brave men and
true men to battle have gone, And good times,
good times are now coming on.”
These were not the only times he touched
on politics (local and national) in his songs. He
also wrote about secession in “That’s What’s
the Matter” and satirized political parades and
processions in “The Great Baby Show,” and,
of course, tackled slavery in a myriad of ways,
most notably in “My Old Kentucky Home,
Good Night.” The song, originally entitled
“Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night,” alludes, in
its early drafts, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
novel. While subsequent drafts removed overt
references to the book, the song retained
enough of its anti-slavery origins to prompt
Frederick Douglass to laud it and other Foster
songs for awakening sympathies for the slave
and allowing “anti-slavery principles take root
and flourish.”26
As a vital transportation hub, Pittsburgh
played an important role in the Civil War,
providing war materials and supplies to the
Union Army. The Fort Pitt Foundry made
mortars, and the Allegheny Arsenal was the
primary military manufacturing facility for
U.S. Army accoutrements, saddles, and other
cavalry equipment, all while turning out as
many as 60,000 small arms cartridges a day.27
Pittsburgh’s operations were so important
to the Union’s efforts that the U.S. War
Department feared it might be targeted for
invasion, which led to the formation of the
Department of the Monongahela to provide a
military presence for Western Pennsylvania.28
Hardly a day must have passed when trains did
not travel through the region toting soldiers
to the front. While Foster himself was not
qualified for active duty, the sights and sounds
of the war inspired him to pay tribute to the
men at the front and the families left behind
with a slew of songs including “Bring My
Brother Back to Me,” “Nothing But a Plain Old
Soldier,” “My Boy is Coming from the War,”
“Kiss Me Dear Mother, Ere I Die,” and others
that mourn the senseless loss of life and the
empty chairs left back home. He even wrote a
song about the “colored” brigades, answering
the criticism that African Americans were not
fit to fight by showing that all they needed to
succeed was commitment to the Union cause:With musket on my shoulder and with
banjo in my hand,
For Union and the Constitution as it
was I stand.
Now some folks think the darkey for
this fighting wasn’t made,
We’ll show them what’s the matter in
the Colored Brigade.29
Foster’s music has had remarkable staying
power, never falling out of public awareness
even as it forgot the name of the composer
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1920 souvenir postcard of the statue in Highland Park.
HHC Detre L&A, GPCC.
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Draft of “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night,” from Stephen Foster’s sketchbook. The title was later shortened to its more familiar “My Old Kentucky Home.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.
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“There are voices of hope that are borne on the air, And our land will be freed from its
clouds of despair, For brave men and true men to battle have
gone, And good times, good times are now
coming on.”
who wrote the tunes. His works were
included in songbooks throughout the late
19th century and became part of the touring
repertoire of popular acts like Jenny Lind
and, much later, the Fisk Jubilee Singers.30 A
half-century after his death, Foster’s songs
were heavily represented in Heart Songs Dear
to the American People, a 1909 anthology
that consisted of songs nominated by 25,000
readers of National Magazine.31 Foster’s tunes
were among the first recorded on Edison’s
cylinders, and received a boost in popularity
during the 1941 ASCAP radio strike, when his
music, especially “Jeanie with the Light Brown
Hair,” received frequent radio play thanks
to being in the public domain.32 With each
new musical genre, Foster’s music has been
reshaped and rearranged, regaining popularity
as vaudeville hits, jazz standards, big band
tunes and, eventually, rock and country-
western songs. They are also commonly found
in film and television soundtracks.33
Since Foster’s death in 1864, Pittsburgh
has striven to memorialize the composer and
further solidify his role in the city’s cultural
history. In 1900, the first physical memorial
for Foster appeared in the city. A statue by
Guiseppe Moretti was erected in Highland
Park at a ceremony attended by nearly 50,000
Pittsburghers, including 3,000 school children
who were led in a medley of Foster songs by
none other than the Pittsburgh Symphony’s
priciple conductor, Victor Herbert.34 However,
the statue became a point of controversy for its
depiction of a seated Foster with his character
“Uncle Ned” at his feet, as if showing the
composer “above” those he was writing about.
As shown here, this was hardly the truth, and
the statue would indeed be more accurate
if the men were side by side. Nonetheless,
repeated criticism and vandalism led to the
statue being moved in 1944 to a more visible
and safe location in Schenley Park outside
Carnegie Library.35
Foster’s music has had remarkable
staying power, never falling out of public awareness even as it forgot the name of the composer who
wrote the tunes.
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Statuette of Stephen Foster in the Center for American Music Library.Photo by Tom Powers.
The next major tribute to Foster was
the Foster Memorial Home, at the site of
Foster’s birthplace, The White Cottage, at
3600 Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville. While the
original home Foster lived in was torn down
in 1865 by then-owner iron manufacturer
Andrew Kloman, the house now at the site
was owned and maintained by the city of
Pittsburgh from 1916 through the 1930s.36
Several Foster descendants, including his
daughter, lived in the home and operated a
small museum in Foster’s honor.37 Also, three
public schools were named in Foster’s honor
in the early 20th century—in Lawrenceville,
McKees Rocks, and Mount Lebanon.38 In
1926, the mayor of Pittsburgh proclaimed
a centennial to honor Foster in the 100th
year since his birth. Throughout the year
numerous concerts and other public events
took place in the city to honor the composer
and his accomplishments.39
The most significant effort made to
keep Stephen Foster’s memory and music
alive must be the Oakland memorial that
shares his name. Conceived in 1927 by
the Tuesday Musical Club (a women’s
organization of semi-professional
musicians) and supported through the
University of Pittsburgh’s generous gift of
land to situate the building, the Stephen
Foster Memorial was intended to be a place
where Foster’s music could be heard and
enjoyed. Those plans changed when Josiah
Lilly, president of Indiana Pharmaceutical
Company, Eli Lilly & Company, learned
of Pittsburgh’s plans. A long-time devotee
of Foster’s music, Lilly had assembled an
impressive collection of “Fosteriana,” all of
which he stored in a small building on his
property that he dubbed Foster Hall. Working
with Fletcher Hodges, Jr., the collection
included manuscripts, photographs, personal
artifacts, every known edition of Foster’s
songs, and countless other valuable materials
that helped to track the composer’s career and
inspirations. When he learned of Pittsburgh’s
efforts to create a building in Foster’s honor,
he donated the entire collection, and arranged
for Hodges to be its curator, all housed in the
new facility.40
Plans were altered to allow the building
to be not just a concert hall, but a museum
and archive dedicated to Foster. Work on
the building began in earnest in 1932 and
was completed in 1937, but the work was
hardly done. The staff continued to acquire
Foster-related materials and also continued
Lilly’s efforts to disseminate information
about Foster and his career to anyone free of
charge. In the Memorial’s formative years, this
meant the creation and distribution of 1,000
first edition reproduction sets of his complete
works, plus thousands of songbooks, articles
in countless publications about Foster’s
work, assisting with Hollywood productions
of Foster biopics, and answering hundreds
of thousands of reference questions from
people all over the world who wanted to
learn more about the composer.41 The
Memorial also began a relationship with
Allegheny Cemetery, the site of Foster’s grave,
including initiating an annual service to
commemorate Foster’s death.
In the 76 years since its creation, the
Stephen Foster Memorial has established
Foster’s rightful position as the father of
American popular song and its library, the
Center for American Music, as the principal
repository for all materials related to Stephen
Foster. The Center has also continued Lilly’s
efforts to research, educate, and preserve
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Josiah Kirby Lilly, benefactor of the Foster Hall Collection, in a photo of a 1941 painting by Malcolm Purcell. University of Kentucky, Samuel M. Wilson Photographic Collection.
Interior, Stephen Foster Memorial. Photo by Tom Powers.
Exterior of the Stephen Foster Memorial.University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.
Learn More Online Find out more about the Stephen Foster
Memorial Museum and the University of Pittsburgh’s Foster Hall Collection.
materials related to Foster’s life and career
and has worked on many high-profile Foster
projects over the years, including a critical
edition of his complete works, numerous
documentaries on his life, and a Grammy-
award winning album of his songs.42
The reasons for sustained interest in
Stephen Foster are complex, just as are the
changing interpretations of Foster’s lyrics, but
much like the city that strongly influenced
his writing, the songs have at their heart a
distinctly American quality. As musicologist
Charles Hamm put it in his book Yesterdays:
Popular Song in America, “Never before, and
rarely since, did any music come so close
to being a shared experience for so many
Americans.”43 Foster’s music speaks to what
it means to live in a country that was shaped
by innovation and industry, advantageous
geography, and creative and hardworking
people. The American experience—and, more
specifically, the Pittsburgh experience—may
have changed over the years in certain ways,
but the same qualities define the region and
continue to make it unique. This is at the
heart of why Foster’s songs still resonate:
they, like the land bisected by rivers and the
neighborhoods divided by cultures, still reflect
who we are today.
Kathryn Miller Haines is the Associate Director
for the Center for American Music at the
University of Pittsburgh. Among its holdings
is the Foster Hall Collection, which continues
to be the principal repository for all materials
pertaining to Stephen Collins Foster.
Visit http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus to learn
about Foster and the Center.
1 Charles Dickens to John Forster, April 4, 1842. Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1842-1843 (Oxford University Press, 1974). Dickens commented in his “American Notes,” “Pittsburg [sic] is like Birmingham in England; at least its towns-people say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its ironworks” (153-154).
2 Stephen Foster to Ann Eliza Foster, September 15, 1845. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
3 Lynne Connor, Pittsburgh In Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 3.
4 Ibid., 28.5 John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster America’s
Troubadour (New York City: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1953), 115.
6 Edward LeRoy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy: from “Daddy” Rice to Date (Kenny Publishing Company, 1911), 6.
7 Morrison Foster, My Brother Stephen (Indianapolis: privately printed, 1932), 25.
8 Stephen Foster to E.P. Christy, June 12, 1851. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.
9 Stephen Foster to E.P. Christy, May 25, 1852. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
10 “Philadelphia’s First Pianos and the Lure of Music,” Philadelphia Antiques Week.Com, April 20, 2012, accessed February 28, 2014. http://www.philadelphiaantiquesweek.com/2012/04/02/philadelphias-first-pianos-and-the-lure-of-music/.
11 William B. Foster to William B. Foster, Jr., September 3, 1841. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
12 Richard Wetzel, Frontier musicians on the Connoquenessing, Wabash, and Ohio: A history of the music and musicians of George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1805-1906 (Ohio University Press, 1976), 85.
13 Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 50.
14 George Grove and Waldo Selden Pratt, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (MacMillan, 1920), 6:334.
15 Stephen Foster to William B. Foster, Jr., “late 1840 or early 1841.” Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
16 Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York City: W.W. Norton, 1979), 215-222.
17 Morrison Foster, 31. 18 Pittsburgh Music History at https://sites.google.com/
site/pittsburghmusichistory/pittsburgh-music-story/teachers-and-schools/henry-kleber.
19 Evelyn Foster Morneweck, Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1944), 2:402.
20 Howard, 133.21 Ibid., 232-233.22 Larry Glasco, The WPA History of the Negro in
Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 104.
Portrait of Foster by George Lafayette Clough, c. 1865.Carnegie Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Stoner.
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23 Fletcher Hodges, Jr., “Stephen Foster Democrat,” Lincoln Herald 47, no. 2 (June 1945): 4.
24 Len Barcousky, “Recounting Abraham Lincoln’s only trip to Pittsburgh, 150 years ago The president-elect arrived by train 150 years ago on Valentine’s Day before inauguration,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 13, 2011.
25 Charles Dahlinger, “Abraham Lincoln in Pittsburgh and the Birth of the Republican Party,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 3, no. 4 (October 1920): 166.
26 Frederick Douglass, “The Anti-Slavery Movement, lecture delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, January, 1855,” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York City: International Publishers, 1950), 2:356-357.
27 John Newton Boucher, A Century and a Half of Pittsburg and Her People (The Lewis Publishing Company, 1908). For more on the Civil War, see Arthur B. Fox, Pittsburgh During the American Civil War, 1860-1865 (Chicora, Pa.:Mechling Bookbindery, 2002).
28 Samuel P. Bates, Martial Deeds of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: T. H. Davis & Co., 1876).
29 Stephen Collins Foster, “A Soldier in the Colored Brigade” (New York City: Firth, Son & Co., 1863).
30 Emerson, 11.31 National Magazine, Heart Songs Dear to the
American People (Boston: Chapple Publishing Co. Ltd, 1909).
32 “No Letup,” Time Magazine, January 27, 1941.33 For more information on Foster’s extensive use in
these mediums, see his entry on the Internet Movie Database website, imdb.com.
34 Morneweck, 2:593.
35 Vernon Gay and Marilyn Evert, Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983).
36 Kloman was also a partner of Henry Phipps and Andrew Carnegie. At the time he tore down the Foster home, he was also in the process of openining the Union Iron Mills in the Strip District, later the site of Crucible Steel. See David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (London: Penguin Press, 2006).
37 “Pictorial Biography of Stephen Collins Foster Part II,” Musical Courier, no. 13 (March 29, 1930): 40.
38 For these and other memorials to Foster in Pittsburgh and beyond, see the section on memorials in Calvin Elliker’s Stephen Collins Foster: A Guide to Research (New York City: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988).
39 “Pittsburgh Honors Foster: City Celebrates Centenary of Composer’s Birth at Lawrenceville,” New York Times, July 5, 1926, 23.
40 For a detailed description of the creation, history, and activities of the Memorial, see Fletcher Hodges, Jr.’s, article “A Pittsburgh Composer and His Memorial,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 21, no. 2 (June 1938).
41 Ibid.42 Deane Root and Steven Saunders, editors, The Music
of Stephen C. Foster: A Critical Edition (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian University Press, 1990). Root is currently Director of the Center for American Music and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Among the documentaries is the PBS American Experience episode, “Stephen Foster.” The Grammy-winning album is Various Artists, Beautiful Dreamer. American Root Publishing, 2004.
43 Hamm.
“My Old Kentucky Home” retained enough of its anti-slavery
origins to prompt Frederick Douglass to laud it and other Foster songs for awakening
sympathies for the slave.
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Statue of Foster and Old Uncle Ned by Guiseppe Moretti.
Photo by Justin M. Postrick.
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