"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concerted piece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the most famous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray and Old Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studied it ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art of song writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi made of songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the great Italian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibited not much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not of the composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacities of the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a pure melodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the management of the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Foster as a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of 'artless' composers.
"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi. The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highest critical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from great musicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached the popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of 'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I am not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he had the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever impressed upon it as pure American.
"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height, superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time, for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It was done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopher enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuition to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.
"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune."
And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.
Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us stood up and sang the chorus.
I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I would no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The Star-Spangled Banner.