Stephen Collins Foster was born on the Fourth of July, 1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, a detail that seems almost too symbolic for a man who would come to be called the father of American music. His parents, William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson Foster, were of Ulster Scots and English descent, and his upbringing was shaped by the rhythms of a large, bustling household: three older sisters and six older brothers surrounded him through childhood. He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, receiving instruction in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics — a thorough education that gave his later lyric writing a certain precision of language even when its subject matter was deliberately informal.
Music seized Foster almost from infancy. His mother recalled him marching through the family home as a small boy, a feather in his cap, pounding a drum and whistling Auld Lang Syne. He taught himself to play the clarinet, drums, flute, guitar, and piano, and he remained a gifted whistler throughout his life, using the practice as a kind of workshop for melody — he reportedly whistled Old Folks at Home long before he committed it to paper. What is striking is that nearly all of this was self-directed. Foster had no formal conservatory training and relied overwhelmingly on his own ear and his appetite for music he encountered in the world around him.
A crucial early influence arrived in 1839, when his brother William arranged for young Stephen to spend time in Towanda under the supervision of Henry Kleber, a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh. Kleber introduced him to the European classical tradition in a disciplined way. Together the two studied the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, and while Foster would never become a composer in the European academic sense, those encounters with sophisticated harmonic structure and formal song writing left clear marks on his melodic thinking.
Foster attended Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, briefly, though his time there was short-lived: his tuition was covered but he had little money for ordinary living expenses, and after leaving for Pittsburgh with another student he simply never returned. His formal schooling effectively ended there, and the years that followed were ones of gradual discovery of his vocation. He moved between Pennsylvania and Ohio, working in his brother Dunning's business in Cincinnati while writing songs on the side, and the compositions began to accumulate.
He married Jane Denny McDowell on July 22, 1850, and the honeymoon took the couple to New York and Baltimore. The following years proved to be his most productive. Between 1850 and 1854 he wrote the songs that would make him immortal: Camptown Races in 1850, Nelly Bly also in 1850, Ring de Banjo in 1851, Old Folks at Home — also known as Swanee River — in 1851, My Old Kentucky Home in 1853, Old Dog Tray in 1853, and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair in 1854, this last composed as a direct tribute to his wife Jane. The songs poured out of him with an ease and abundance that suggests someone working at the height of his gifts.
Many of Foster's most famous compositions were taken up eagerly by the blackface minstrel companies that dominated American popular entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century. Foster himself had a complicated relationship with this context. He expressed a desire to elevate the genre, to write words suitable for refined audiences rather than relying on the crude caricature that defined much minstrel output. His minstrel output did decline sharply after the early 1850s as he turned increasingly to parlor music — songs suited to domestic performance by middle-class families gathered around the piano. The Southern atmosphere of many of his songs is striking given that he never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon.
Over the course of his career Foster wrote more than two hundred songs. Yet despite his fame and productivity, he was chronically unable to manage his financial affairs, and the copyright arrangements of the period often left composers with little lasting income from even their most popular work. By the final years of his life, he was living in poverty in New York City, the details of his day-to-day existence largely unrecorded. He became ill with a fever in January 1864. Weakened, he suffered a serious injury — he was found by his writing partner George Cooper lying in his hotel room in the Bowery in a pool of blood, apparently having fallen and cut his neck. Whether the fall was accidental or not remains a question that biographers have long debated without resolution.
Foster was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he died three days later on January 13, 1864, at the age of thirty-seven. His leather wallet contained almost nothing. He was buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, and the modest circumstances of his death stood in sharp contrast to the richness he had given American musical culture. His songs endured long after the minstrel tradition that had carried some of them faded into historical disrepute, crossing into the mainstream of American popular memory, folk revival, and even classical concert programming. His brother Morrison Foster survived him and may have destroyed correspondence and documents that reflected poorly on the family, which is why so many details of Foster's life remain permanently obscure. What is not obscure is the music: Oh! Susanna, Beautiful Dreamer, Hard Times Come Again No More — they outlasted the complicated world that produced them.
