The note inside Foster's wallet is said to have inspired Bob Hilliard's lyric for " Dear Hearts and Gentle People" (1949). Telegram that communicated Stephen Foster's death addressed to his brother Morrison Foster that Foster's injuries may have been "accidental or self-inflicted". As O'Connell and musicologist Ken Emerson have noted, several of the songs Foster wrote during the last years of his life foreshadow his death, such as "The Little Ballad Girl" and "Kiss Me Dear Mother Ere I Die." Emerson says in his 2010 Stephen Foster and Co. Historian JoAnne O'Connell speculates in her biography, The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster, that Foster may have killed himself. Other biographers describe different accounts of his death. His leather wallet contained a scrap of paper that simply said, "Dear friends and gentle hearts", along with 37 cents in Civil War scrip and three pennies. Foster died in Bellevue Hospital three days later at the age of 37. His writing partner George Cooper found him still alive but lying in a pool of blood. Weakened, it is possible he fell in his hotel in the Bowery and cut his neck he may also have sought to take his own life. Illness and death A Pittsburgh Press illustration of the original headstone on Stephen Foster's graveįoster became sick with a fever in January 1864. There is little information on this period of his life, although family correspondence has been preserved. įoster's last four years were spent in New York City. Available archival evidence does not suggest that Foster was an abolitionist. Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon. However, Foster's output of minstrel songs declined after the early 1850s, as he turned primarily to parlor music. He sought to "build up taste.among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order". Many of Foster's songs were used in the blackface minstrel shows popular at the time. Foster then returned to Pennsylvania and wrote most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Ring de Banjo" (1851), "Old Folks at Home" (known also as "Swanee River", 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane. Career House in Hoboken, New Jersey where Foster is believed to have written " Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" in 1854 įoster married Jane Denny McDowell on Jand they visited New York and Baltimore on their honeymoon. He left Canonsburg to visit Pittsburgh with another student and did not return. His tuition was paid, but he had little spending money. Foster's education included a brief period at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, now part of Washington & Jefferson College. The site of the Camptown Races – which would provide both the title and setting for events of one of Foster's best-known songs – was located 30 miles (48 km) from Athens and 15 miles (24 km) from Towanda. Together the pair studied the work of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Under Kleber, Stephen was exposed to music composition. In 1839, his brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at Towanda and thought that Stephen would benefit from being under the supervision of Henry Kleber (1816–1897), a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh. įoster taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute, and piano. The family lived in a northern city but they did not support the abolition of slavery. He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, and received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He had three older sisters and six older brothers. His parents, William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson Foster, were of Ulster Scots and English descent. įoster was born on July 4, 1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. Among other issues, Foster wrote very little biographical information himself, and his brother Morrison Foster may have destroyed much information that he judged to reflect negatively upon the family. There are many biographies of Foster, but details differ widely. He wrote more than 200 songs, including " Oh! Susanna", " Hard Times Come Again No More", " Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River"), " My Old Kentucky Home", " Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", " Old Black Joe", and " Beautiful Dreamer", and many of his compositions remain popular today.īiography Foster's parents, Eliza Tomlinson Foster and William Barclay Foster Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864), known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and minstrel music during the Romantic period.
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