Table of Contents

* Introduction * American Eden * A Fathers Fall * Death And The Maiden * The Crying Game * Out Of The Mouths Of Babes * Jumping Jim Crow * I Prefer Not To * O Temperance, O Mores! * Genuine Negro Fun * Pigeon Wing And Moonbeams * Pittsburgh In Ruins * Hog Heaven * Ice Cream And The Annihilation of Time And Space * Whistled On The Wind * Jennie With The Light Brown Hair * Gwine To Write All Night * The Raven And The Nightengale * From Blacks To Folks * Possum Fat And Flowrets * A Shock Of Recognition * White Mens Music * Heard Anything From Stephen Lately? * Hard Times * Politics And Punkins * When The Muse Is Missing * Almost A Spiritual * All In The Family * Infernal Swish-Swish! * Rum And Religion * Last Pall * Afterword

About the Author

Ken Emerson, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and New York Newsday, has written about popular music for thirty years. He lives in New Jersey.

Reviews

Stephen Foster might be considered America's first professional composer. His songs include "Oh! Susanna," "Old Folks at Home," and "Old Black Joe," tunes so enduring that they are sometimes considered folk songs. Yet Foster died penniless and didn't help his case for posterity by frequently selling all the rights to his songs, or worse, in the case of "Old Folks at Home," being so foolish as to sell the credit for the song to E.P. Christy for a pittance. Nonetheless, Foster's musical creations have influenced musicians as diverse as Antonin Dvorak, Charles Ives, and Al Jolson. Emerson, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, endeavors in this well-researched and -documented book to reveal the man behind the music. Emerson discusses Foster's life and music (with emphasis on the lyrics) within the context of the events and personalities of the era. The book goes a long way towards dispelling the myths that have surrounded the composer. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.‘Michael Colby, Univ. of California, Davis

Emerson, essayist and editor (Newsday, the New York Times Magazine), has written about music for the past 25 years. Now he explores the roots of early popular music while tracing the tragic life of composer Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864), who wrote nearly 200 songs. Some became much-loved American classics‘"Oh! Susannah" (1848), "Camptown Races" (1850), "Old Folks at Home" (1851, aka "Swanee River"), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854) and "Old Black Joe" (1860). Yet Foster is a songwriter whose tunes are better known than he is: born on the 4th of July in what is now Pittsburgh, Foster and his songs were identified with the South‘although he had lived only in the North, and had written about the South before ever having seen it. In addition to his sentimental songs and parlor ballads, he also wrote his "Ethiopian Melodies" for E.P. Christy's Minstrels. Foster had a "genteel reluctance to acknowledge these blackface ditties as his own" and this, combined with his own poor business sense, meant that others pocketed the profits. Even as his tunes were heard internationally, he was going broke, eventually composing in a Bowery barroom and dying a penniless alcoholic at age 37. Although fewer than 30 of the composer's letters survive, Emerson has sought out almost every known Foster fact. He also aims his spotlight at other musical personalities of the period, and provides further illumination of how his songs have been incorporated into popular contemporary melodies‘such as Disney's "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" (Song of the South, 1946) from the chorus of the 1834 blackface song, "Zip Coon." The book abounds with such linkages, racial fusions, and present-day cultural reverberations. Emerson's exhaustive research (indicated by an 18-page bibliography) has been meticulously worked into a vivid portrait of 19th-century America. Discography. Photos not seen by PW. (May)