The Last Hope, Ojos Creollos (Creole Eyes), Banjo, Souvenirs of Andalusia are among the most popular of his ninety compositions for piano, which showed the strong influence of life in Louisiana, his love of sunshiny Spain, and his study in France. Here we find rhythms closely related to ragtime and jazz, as well as the slow fascinating Spanish dance. Today his works are forgotten, but for many years they were played throughout the land.
Stephen Collins Foster
Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864), for whom we have claimed the right to be called a composer of folk songs, was born in Lawrenceville (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, on the fiftieth anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. The understanding he showed of the Negro came to him because his parents were Southerners. He showed talent for music when he was very young, and taught himself to play the flageolet when he was seven years old. He was very self-willed and did not like discipline, so he taught himself practically all he knew of music. His first composition, Tioga Waltz for four flutes, was written when he was a school boy. It was first played in school, with Stephen in the lead. His first song, Open thy Lattice, Love, was published in 1842. For several years, five boys met at the Foster home, and Stephen taught them to sing part songs. He composed many pieces for them, among them Oh, Susannah, Old Uncle Ned and Old Black Joe.
About 1830, an actor, Thomas Rice, had the idea of dressing up like an old negro porter in Pittsburgh, from whom he borrowed the clothes, and singing a song he had heard from a negro stage driver:
Turn about and wheel about, and do jist so,
And ebery time I turn about, I jump Jim Crow.
The song, accompanied by a dance, took the audience by storm, especially when the porter appeared on the stage, half dressed, and demanded his clothes, because the whistle of the steamboat had just blown and the old fellow had to “get back on the job.” So “Daddy” Rice became the father of “Negro Minstrels,” and travelled all over America and even England, singing and dancing negro songs. A few years later Stephen Foster sent his Oh, Susannah to a travelling minstrel troupe, and the song took “like wild fire.” He decided to write songs as a profession, in spite of his family who thought he had wasted time “fooling around” with music, and insisted on his going to work.
While Oh, Susannah is a “rollicking jingle,” Old Uncle Ned is the “first of the pathetic negro songs that set Foster apart from his contemporaries and gave him a place in musical history,” says Harold Vincent Milligan. “In this type of song, universal in the appeal of its naïve pathos he has never had an equal.”
Another claim he has as a folk song composer, is that he never studied as most people do who want to be composers. He knew very little about harmony and less of counterpoint, and his is “music that has come into existence without the influence of conscious art, as a spontaneous utterance, filled with characteristic expression of the feelings of a people.” (H. E. Krehbiel.) Perhaps he was right when he said that he was afraid that study would rob him of the gift of spontaneous melody that was his to such a marked degree, because he was not naturally a student and might never have carried his studies far enough. At any rate we have every reason to be grateful for the simple direct songs which are dear to us and as near to our hearts as any folk song of any age or country whose author has been forgotten!
He was sweet-natured, irresponsible, refined and sensitive, but easily influenced. His publishers made $10,000 out of his songs, but he made little and spent much. He married in 1850, but the union was not happy.