Stephen Collins Foster, the celebrated song writer, was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1826. At the age of fifteen years he entered Jefferson College, at Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, but music had set its seal upon him and he soon returned to Pittsburgh to pursue it. The next few years were almost entirely devoted to his musical studies, though he had a living to make. The year of 1842 found Foster clerking in a Cincinnati store; and during this time his first song, Open Thy Lattice, Love, was published at Baltimore. Uncle Ned, and O Susannah! followed fast upon his first effort, and the three launched him upon his career. He relinquished his business cares, and surrendered his life to song. In 1850 Foster married Jane McDowell of Pittsburgh, and they lived at New York City for a short time before settling at Pittsburgh. His Camptown Races, and My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight, appeared in 1850. It is surely a regrettable fact that the most famous Kentucky song was not written by a Kentucky hand. Foster's only child, Mrs. Marion Foster Welsh, of Pittsburgh, has recently repudiated the ancient tale that is told of the origin of My Old Kentucky Home, but as she declined to furnish the real history of the song, saying she would make it known at the proper time, nothing better than the often repeated story can be told here. Foster was visiting his kinsman, Judge John Rowan, at his home, "Federal Hill," near Bardstown, Kentucky, and on this typical Southern plantation, with its negroes and their cabins, My Old Kentucky Home was written. The story is usually elaborated, but as it has been set aside by the author's daughter, further comment is not worth while. It is enough to know that it was written in Kentucky. Foster went to New York City in 1860, and the same year Old Black Joe appeared. Old Folks at Home, Nelly was a Lady, Nelly Bly, Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground, Old Dog Tray, Don't Bet Your Money on the Shanghai, We Are Coming, Father Abraham, and dozens of other songs have kept Foster's fame green. His beautiful serenade, Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, is his highest note in genuine scientific music. Foster died at New York, January 13, 1864, and he was buried in Allegheny cemetery, Pittsburgh. In 1906 the Kentucky home-comers never seemed to tire of My Old Kentucky Home, and a fitting memorial was unveiled at Louisville by Foster's daughter in honor of the song's maker. It is known and sung in the remotest corners of the world. Mr. James Lane Allen's fine tribute to the poet's memory may be found in The Bride of the Mistletoe:

"More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield [Kentucky], a writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world knows it—the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of American home life—embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber of sound."

Bibliography. Atlantic Monthly (November, 1867); Current Literature (September, 1901). Strangely enough no formal biography of Foster has been written.

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, GOOD-NIGHT

[From Stephen Collins Foster Statue (Louisville, Kentucky, 1906, a pamphlet)]