Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer—A Friend Comes to the Rescu His Originality—“My Old Kentucky Home” and the “Old Folks at Home”—General Sherman and “Marching Through Georgia”

I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago of Stephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and could have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musical scrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S. Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may be found in Schubert’s posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction for there it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidence of the truth of Hays’ story.

Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled to serious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of character and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannot fail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quoting him at length.

“I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to his death,” says Mr. Allison, “and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink, which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was one continuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and of languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent, to delimit the wider development of his genius.

“Now as to Foster’s drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to him they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us. No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin or—even in our own time—of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster’s pen, even as penetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and solitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what the drinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificial stimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant, ‘Send the other generals some of the same brand.’

“Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. He inherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted in English letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains he added undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother or great-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguished Kentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster’s family, his father, his brothers, his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, in commerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the early Pennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of that great corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction. But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary, destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of his person and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation, were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediate family and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur of timidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death.

“Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the ‘ne’er-do-well of a good family’ who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrel haunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show that Foster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially a solitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly into the facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with its crowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness or indifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was a popular idol.

“Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on the authority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not compose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublished manuscripts by an unnamed old ‘German musician and thus dishonestly, by pilfering and suppression’ palmed off upon the public themes and compositions which he could not himself have originated. Something like this has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whose personality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implying the possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance and a theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before it accepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon’s paternity in Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay’s in early Kentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the ‘poor, unknown German musician’ who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs that have obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless young composers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their later work. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays. And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip about Foster.

“I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut from The Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer’s death, in which he sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article he lays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themes and of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rather native inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge of Foster how they were ‘written from his heart.’ No mention or suggestion in it of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the world then and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal. While you may have heard something in Schubert’s compositions that suggested something in Foster’s most famous song, still I venture to say it was only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers of the same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalists and dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression in their similar progressions.

“The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work were Beethoven, GlÜck, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of the Italian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster’s first and only music teacher—except in the ‘do-re-mi’ exercises in his schoolboy life—testifies that Foster’s musical apprehension was so quick, his intuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time there was nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that his pupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline for himself.

“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.