pittsburgh, beloved songs like “hard times come

W E S T E R N P E N N S Y L V A N I A H I S T O R Y | F A L L 2 0 1 434

Stephen Foster has been described as many things over the years, among them a folk songwriter, a popular songwriter, and an American songwriter. But what many people

forget is that he was first and foremost a Pittsburgh songwriter. Without the ethnically diverse population, commerce, heritage, and industry of 19th-century Pittsburgh, beloved songs like “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Camptown Races,” and “Oh, Susanna” might never have existed.

SBy Kathryn Miller Haines

W E S T E R N P E N N S Y L V A N I A H I S T O R Y | F A L L 2 0 1 4 35

While modern audiences question

Foster’s position towards African Americans

based on some of his lyrics using exaggerated

dialog, a closer look reveals his compassion for

blacks, fostered right here at home. Stephen

Foster was indeed a product of his time and

place; Pittsburgh’s unique history and culture

before, during, and after Foster’s lifetime

shaped the content of his work and prolonged

the life of his musical legacy.

Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh was a

microcosm of the industrial landscape of

the rest of the United States. Dubbed the

“Birmingham of America” by none other than

Charles Dickens, Pittsburgh was an established

manufacturer of iron, glass, steam engines,

and steamboats at the time of Stephen Foster’s

birth in 1826.1 The city was already wrapped

in a heavy pall of coal dust that remained

part of its image well into the 1970s. While

factories did not make as overt appearances in

Foster’s work as they did in Dickens’ novels,

Pittsburgh’s industry emerged again and again

in Foster’s music, from the steamship in “The

Glendy Burk” (“The smoke goes up and the

engine roars, And the wheel goes round and

round”), to the allusion to mill and factory

workers alike left frail and fainting at the door

thanks to long, unregulated hours in “Hard

Times Come Again No More.”

It was not just heavy industry that lined

Pittsburgh’s waterways. The same three rivers

that made it a valued defensive outpost during

the French & Indian War had come to serve

cotton mills that seemed better suited to the

South. The mills—along with the riverboats

and packets used to transport raw cotton to

the city—provided young Stephen Foster with

a glimpse of the lives and customs of enslaved

African Americans and other dock workers.

The mix of people and dialects would ignite

in his mind complex questions about race and

inspire characters in some of his most beloved

songs. Most of all, Foster did not just observe

the mills and workers from afar; his first job

was sweeping the floor at Pittsburgh’s Hope

Cotton Mill.2

The city was a welcome port for

workers and travelers and as such it grew

to accommodate the needs of visitors by

providing a wide range of entertainment that

would have been expected in Manhattan,

but not at the edge of the frontier. The first

freestanding theater opened in Pittsburgh in

1813.3 By the 1860s, Pittsburgh had several

dedicated playhouses, 25 stages, a myriad

of concert saloons, and four

assembly halls.4 While during

Foster’s formative years the

performance opportunities were

not quite so numerous, the city

was home to venues that welcomed

touring circuses, theater companies,

and big name actors like Edwin

Booth and opera impresarios like

Henry Russell who made the city a

destination on their way to New York

via river, canal, and eventually, rail.5

For a young boy in a relatively small

city, this exposure to entertainments of

the highest order not only shaped his

own work (Foster parodied Russell in his

1851 song “Farewell, Old Cottage”), but

made talent of that magnitude seem like

something within his reach. He did not

have to stay a regional songwriter any more

than the people of Pittsburgh had to restrict

themselves to regional talents.

Of course the form of entertainment

that had the biggest impact on Foster’s

career, and creates the greatest controversy

when appraising the composer today, was the

minstrel show. These performances featured

white men donning black face and aping

African American men and women, as well

as creating caricatures of Irish and German

immigrants and the perceived differences

between high and low classes. While one might

assume that the minstrel show was conceived in

the antebellum South, it was actually born and

nurtured in the most rapidly industrializing

regions in America: the Northeast and the

Ohio River Valley. Foster was exposed to these

shows quite early in his life—white men were

parodying black men in public performances

in the U.S. as early as 1815.6 By attending these

shows, and participating in amateur versions

himself, he learned several things that could

eventually be applied to his own career: the

tropes and themes that made a minstrel song

successful, the troupes and performers who

achieved the greatest level of success, and the

value of having one’s work associated with

The mix of people and dialects would ignite in his mind

complex questions about race and inspire characters in some

of his most beloved songs.



The original of this Stephen Foster portrait, showing him late in life, measures only 1.2 inches high.University of Pittsburgh Library System,

Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.

such a popular form of entertainment.7 The

impact of these lessons became apparent

years later in his dealings with E.P. Christy,

the leader of The Christy Minstrels, the most

popular minstrel troupe of the day. In an 1851

letter, Foster wrote to Christy:I have just received a letter from Mess.

Firth, Pond & Co., stating that they have

copy-righted a new song of mine (“Oh!

Boys, carry me ‘long”) but will not be

able to issue it for some little time yet,

owing to other engagements. This will

give me time to send you the m.s. and

allow you the privilege of singing it

for at least two weeks, and probably a

month before it is issued, or before any

other band gets it… This song is certain

to become popular, as I have taken great

pains with it. If you accept my proposi-

tion I will make it a point to notify you

hereafter when I have a new song and

send you the m.s. on the same terms,

reserving to suit myself in all cases the

exclusive privilege of publishing. Thus

it will become notorious that your band

bring out all the new songs. You can

state in the papers that this song was

composed expressly for you.8

It is the South we think of when we hear

minstrel songs like “My Old Kentucky Home”

and “Old Folks at Home” (state songs for

Kentucky and Florida, respectively), but while

that geography is evoked, it is the freed slave’s

experiences that Foster captures as he writes

about a plantation life that is now “far, far

away,” and about loved ones who were left

behind to toil while the speaker escaped in

hopes of finding a better life. Being situated in a

Northern state may have also inspired Foster’s

desire to humanize his black characters, as he

gradually eschewed stereotyped dialect, and

crafted men and women of color who were

intended to be empathized with, rather than

crude caricatures held at a distance by the

audience. He expressed such sentiments in a

May 25, 1852, letter to Christy:As I once intimated to you, I had the

intention of omitting my name on my

Ethiopian songs, owing to the preju-

dice against them by some, which

might injure my reputation as writer of

Broadside displaying the lyrics of “Hard Times Come Again No More.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music,

Foster Hall Collection.


another style of music, but I find that

by my efforts I have done a great deal

to build up a taste for the Ethiopian

songs among refined people by making

the words suitable to their taste, instead

of the trashy and really offensive words

which belong to songs of that order.9

Easy access to transportation not only

allowed Foster to encounter people from other

regions, it also made it easier to obtain goods

that otherwise might not have been introduced

into the region until years later. By the time

Charles Rosenbaum began manufacturing

pianofortes in Pittsburgh in 1815, the first

piano had already crossed the Alleghenies.10

To a young Stephen Foster, the instrument,

still foreign in so many regions of the U.S.,

seemed ubiquitous and exposed him to tools

that may not have been available in other areas

of the country. In fact, by 1841, when Stephen

was barely in his teens, his father, William

Barclay Foster, was already describing Foster’s

near obsession with music, writing, “his leisure

hours are all devoted to musick, for which he

possesses a strange talent.”11

It is the people who make a city and so

it was the people who shaped Pittsburgh who

had such a strong influence on Foster’s music.

Many of the early German and English settlers

of Pittsburgh were accomplished classical

musicians who passed on their skills to the

children of pioneers. The utopian Harmony

Society near Zelienople established one of the

first orchestras in the U.S., which was said to

have performed the first symphony composed

west of the Alleghenies.12 In the 1820s and ’30s,

musician immigrants like Henry Kleber and

W.C. Peters opened music stores in the city.13

And by 1844, when Foster was almost finished

with his own secondary education, Pittsburgh

became the first public school district in

Pennsylvania and the fifth in the country to

institute required music education.14 For a boy

who struggled to balance what was expected of

him with his desire to pursue the arts (while

away at school, he made a promise in a letter

to his eldest brother that he would not “pay

any attention to my music until after eight

Oclock in the evening”), he didn’t have to look

far to learn that music, while not an income-

boosting pursuit, was socially valuable.15

The immigrant influence did not just

shape Pittsburgh’s musical community; it


Sheet music cover lithograph of the Christy Minstrels in costume, 1848.University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music,Foster Hall Collection.

Sheet music cover for Foster’s “We Are Coming Father Abra’am, 300,000 More.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.

Charlotte Susanna Fosterby James M. Edwards, Trustee, Allegheny Cemetery

In a shady vale of Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville is

the William Barclay Foster family plot with the gravesite

of America’s pioneering songwriter, Stephen Foster. “Oh!

Susanna,” America’s best-selling sheet music in the nineteenth

century, stands out as his greatest hit. First performed in 1847 at the

Eagle Ice Cream Saloon on Wood Street downtown, it became an instant

hit among minstrel performers nationwide. A few years later, the song

was cherished worldwide.

Who was Susanna? No one knows for sure and Foster didn’t say.

The lyrics are examined at length in Ken Emerson’s 1997 biography

Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture.

Emerson states clearly that Susanna is none other than Stephen’s sister,

Charlotte Susanna Foster.

Stephen was born into a large and bustling family. Charlotte,

17 years older, had a profound effect on young Stephen: she had an

exceptional singing voice, she played the family piano, and she sang the

first songs Stephen ever heard.

When she was 20, Charlotte travelled down the Ohio River to

Louisville to visit relatives and spend the summer. She contracted what

was probably malaria and died before she could be brought home.

A witness said she sang a song the morning of her death. She was

buried in Louisville, but two decades later—in 1852, four years after

“Oh! Susanna” had swept the nation—her remains were exhumed

and brought back to the family plot. Brother and sister are once again

together, she one row deeper and four graves east of Stephen himself,

the stone almost hidden in the lush sod:

CHARLOTTE SUSANNA FOSTERBORN DECEMBER 14, 1809

DIED IN LOUISVILLE OCTOBER 20, 1829HER REMAINS WERE REMOVED AND RE-INTERRED

BENEATH THIS STONE SEPTEMBER 10, 1852

promoter of the 19th century.18 Foster

dedicated his piano piece “The Village Bells

Polka” to Kleber, and included arrangements

of four Kleber songs in his Social Orchestra.

Kleber even provided the music for Foster’s

funeral. Foster’s brother, Morrison, admitted

in his biography, amidst claims that his

brother learned to play the flute unaided and

could pick out harmonies on the guitar at

two years old, that Kleber was his brother’s

tutor. Strangely, Kleber never claimed credit

for serving as Foster’s music instructor despite

their obvious affection for each other.

It was not Pittsburgh alone that provided

young Stephen Foster with an opportunity to

experience music. The city’s riverboats and rails

can be felt in the slow, mazurka-like tempo

of Foster’s temperance song “Comrades,

Fill No Glass for Me,” the polka beat in

“Oh, Susanna,” the Italian-melody inspired

“Beautiful Dreamer” and Foster’s many lyrical

and melodic allusions to the work of Irishman

Thomas Moore, most evident in his “Jeanie

with the Light Brown Hair.” Foster studied the

immigrant groups he heard around him and

borrowed from their musical styles with the

intent of appealing to a wide audience.16 More

directly, despite family claims that Foster was

an “untutored genius,” his relationship with

Henry Kleber cannot be denied.17 Kleber was

Pittsburgh’s best-known musical performer,

composer, merchant, teacher, and concert

allowed easy passage to towns like Cincinnati,

Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, of course,

New York, where music publishers were

rapidly growing thanks to new technologies.

Although evidence of such trips is limited,

steamship travel may have allowed Foster,

like his mother and sisters, to travel south to

Kentucky where he witnessed plantation life

firsthand.19 We know Foster took advantage

of opportunities to travel around the

country. Foster moved to Cincinnati in

1846 to work as a bookkeeper for his

brother, Dunning.20 During his three

years there, his first minstrel songs

took off in popularity; he signed a

professional agreement with the

Photo by James M. Edwards.


It is the people who make a city and so it was the people who shaped

Pittsburgh who had such a strong influence

on Foster’s music.

music publishers Firth, Pond & Co. of New

York and F.D. Benteen of Baltimore; and

gained enough confidence in his songwriting

abilities that upon his return to Pittsburgh,

he rented an office and piano and became a

full-time songwriter. Later, Foster moved to

Hoboken, New Jersey, and then across the

Hudson to New York City itself to be closer

to his publishers and the frenetic music scene

there.21 Without this easy access to professional

resources and distribution, Foster may

have remained a hobbyist rather than a

professional composer.

Politics, too, flourished in Pittsburgh

in unique ways. Perhaps because of its large

African American community, Pittsburgh

became the center for abolitionist activity

in Pennsylvania, encouraging visits by such

luminaries of the movement as William Lloyd

Garrison and Frederick Douglass.22 One of

Stephen’s closest friends, the poet Charles P.

Shiras, edited The Albatross, one of several

abolitionist newspapers in Pittsburgh, and

authored a volume of poetry that criticized

the treatment of labor and the conditions

of Pittsburgh’s mills. His ideals must have

impacted Foster, whose own family consisted

of ardent Democrats, the party that was, at

the time, supportive of maintaining the status

quo, including slavery.23

Both president-elect Abraham Lincoln

and the newly elected provisional Confederacy

president, Jefferson Davis, made stops in

Pittsburgh shortly after being voted into

office.24 In his brief remarks the day after

his arrival in the city, Lincoln said no words

of praise were necessary about Allegheny

County, “as it was already widely known as the

‘banner county’ of the State, if not of the whole

Union.”25 Despite the huge crowds that turned

out to hear Lincoln in the rain, Pittsburgh was

actually a politically divisive town. While the

city and Allegheny County voters strongly

backed Republicans in gubernatorial and

presidential races, the region had plenty of

Democrats, like the Fosters, who sympathized

with the Southern cause. Stephen Foster’s

admiration for Lincoln cannot be denied,

however. While there’s no evidence Foster

was in the rain-soaked crowd during Lincoln’s

inaugural tour, his arrangement of “We are

Coming Father Abra’am, 300,000 More”


Henry Kleber, Pittsburgh’s best-known musician of the 19th century.HHC Detre L&A, Oversize Print Collection.

speaks to his commitment to Lincoln’s cause.

Foster’s “Better Days are Coming” further

cements his admiration for the Union with

lyrics like, “There are voices of hope that are

borne on the air, And our land will be freed

from its clouds of despair, For brave men and

true men to battle have gone, And good times,

good times are now coming on.”

These were not the only times he touched

on politics (local and national) in his songs. He

also wrote about secession in “That’s What’s

the Matter” and satirized political parades and

processions in “The Great Baby Show,” and,

of course, tackled slavery in a myriad of ways,

most notably in “My Old Kentucky Home,

Good Night.” The song, originally entitled

“Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night,” alludes, in

its early drafts, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s

novel. While subsequent drafts removed overt

references to the book, the song retained

enough of its anti-slavery origins to prompt

Frederick Douglass to laud it and other Foster

songs for awakening sympathies for the slave

and allowing “anti-slavery principles take root

and flourish.”26

As a vital transportation hub, Pittsburgh

played an important role in the Civil War,

providing war materials and supplies to the

Union Army. The Fort Pitt Foundry made

mortars, and the Allegheny Arsenal was the

primary military manufacturing facility for

U.S. Army accoutrements, saddles, and other

cavalry equipment, all while turning out as

many as 60,000 small arms cartridges a day.27

Pittsburgh’s operations were so important

to the Union’s efforts that the U.S. War

Department feared it might be targeted for

invasion, which led to the formation of the

Department of the Monongahela to provide a

military presence for Western Pennsylvania.28

Hardly a day must have passed when trains did

not travel through the region toting soldiers

to the front. While Foster himself was not

qualified for active duty, the sights and sounds

of the war inspired him to pay tribute to the

men at the front and the families left behind

with a slew of songs including “Bring My

Brother Back to Me,” “Nothing But a Plain Old

Soldier,” “My Boy is Coming from the War,”

“Kiss Me Dear Mother, Ere I Die,” and others

that mourn the senseless loss of life and the

empty chairs left back home. He even wrote a

song about the “colored” brigades, answering

the criticism that African Americans were not

fit to fight by showing that all they needed to

succeed was commitment to the Union cause:With musket on my shoulder and with

banjo in my hand,

For Union and the Constitution as it

was I stand.

Now some folks think the darkey for

this fighting wasn’t made,

We’ll show them what’s the matter in

the Colored Brigade.29

Foster’s music has had remarkable staying

power, never falling out of public awareness

even as it forgot the name of the composer


1920 souvenir postcard of the statue in Highland Park.

HHC Detre L&A, GPCC.


Draft of “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night,” from Stephen Foster’s sketchbook. The title was later shortened to its more familiar “My Old Kentucky Home.”University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.


“There are voices of hope that are borne on the air, And our land will be freed from its

clouds of despair, For brave men and true men to battle have

gone, And good times, good times are now

coming on.”

who wrote the tunes. His works were

included in songbooks throughout the late

19th century and became part of the touring

repertoire of popular acts like Jenny Lind

and, much later, the Fisk Jubilee Singers.30 A

half-century after his death, Foster’s songs

were heavily represented in Heart Songs Dear

to the American People, a 1909 anthology

that consisted of songs nominated by 25,000

readers of National Magazine.31 Foster’s tunes

were among the first recorded on Edison’s

cylinders, and received a boost in popularity

during the 1941 ASCAP radio strike, when his

music, especially “Jeanie with the Light Brown

Hair,” received frequent radio play thanks

to being in the public domain.32 With each

new musical genre, Foster’s music has been

reshaped and rearranged, regaining popularity

as vaudeville hits, jazz standards, big band

tunes and, eventually, rock and country-

western songs. They are also commonly found

in film and television soundtracks.33

Since Foster’s death in 1864, Pittsburgh

has striven to memorialize the composer and

further solidify his role in the city’s cultural

history. In 1900, the first physical memorial

for Foster appeared in the city. A statue by

Guiseppe Moretti was erected in Highland

Park at a ceremony attended by nearly 50,000

Pittsburghers, including 3,000 school children

who were led in a medley of Foster songs by

none other than the Pittsburgh Symphony’s

priciple conductor, Victor Herbert.34 However,

the statue became a point of controversy for its

depiction of a seated Foster with his character

“Uncle Ned” at his feet, as if showing the

composer “above” those he was writing about.

As shown here, this was hardly the truth, and

the statue would indeed be more accurate

if the men were side by side. Nonetheless,

repeated criticism and vandalism led to the

statue being moved in 1944 to a more visible

and safe location in Schenley Park outside

Carnegie Library.35

Foster’s music has had remarkable

staying power, never falling out of public awareness even as it forgot the name of the composer who

wrote the tunes.


Statuette of Stephen Foster in the Center for American Music Library.Photo by Tom Powers.

The next major tribute to Foster was

the Foster Memorial Home, at the site of

Foster’s birthplace, The White Cottage, at

3600 Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville. While the

original home Foster lived in was torn down

in 1865 by then-owner iron manufacturer

Andrew Kloman, the house now at the site

was owned and maintained by the city of

Pittsburgh from 1916 through the 1930s.36

Several Foster descendants, including his

daughter, lived in the home and operated a

small museum in Foster’s honor.37 Also, three

public schools were named in Foster’s honor

in the early 20th century—in Lawrenceville,

McKees Rocks, and Mount Lebanon.38 In

1926, the mayor of Pittsburgh proclaimed

a centennial to honor Foster in the 100th

year since his birth. Throughout the year

numerous concerts and other public events

took place in the city to honor the composer

and his accomplishments.39

The most significant effort made to

keep Stephen Foster’s memory and music

alive must be the Oakland memorial that

shares his name. Conceived in 1927 by

the Tuesday Musical Club (a women’s

organization of semi-professional

musicians) and supported through the

University of Pittsburgh’s generous gift of

land to situate the building, the Stephen

Foster Memorial was intended to be a place

where Foster’s music could be heard and

enjoyed. Those plans changed when Josiah

Lilly, president of Indiana Pharmaceutical

Company, Eli Lilly & Company, learned

of Pittsburgh’s plans. A long-time devotee

of Foster’s music, Lilly had assembled an

impressive collection of “Fosteriana,” all of

which he stored in a small building on his

property that he dubbed Foster Hall. Working

with Fletcher Hodges, Jr., the collection

included manuscripts, photographs, personal

artifacts, every known edition of Foster’s

songs, and countless other valuable materials

that helped to track the composer’s career and

inspirations. When he learned of Pittsburgh’s

efforts to create a building in Foster’s honor,

he donated the entire collection, and arranged

for Hodges to be its curator, all housed in the

new facility.40

Plans were altered to allow the building

to be not just a concert hall, but a museum

and archive dedicated to Foster. Work on

the building began in earnest in 1932 and

was completed in 1937, but the work was

hardly done. The staff continued to acquire

Foster-related materials and also continued

Lilly’s efforts to disseminate information

about Foster and his career to anyone free of

charge. In the Memorial’s formative years, this

meant the creation and distribution of 1,000

first edition reproduction sets of his complete

works, plus thousands of songbooks, articles

in countless publications about Foster’s

work, assisting with Hollywood productions

of Foster biopics, and answering hundreds

of thousands of reference questions from

people all over the world who wanted to

learn more about the composer.41 The

Memorial also began a relationship with

Allegheny Cemetery, the site of Foster’s grave,

including initiating an annual service to

commemorate Foster’s death.

In the 76 years since its creation, the

Stephen Foster Memorial has established

Foster’s rightful position as the father of

American popular song and its library, the

Center for American Music, as the principal

repository for all materials related to Stephen

Foster. The Center has also continued Lilly’s

efforts to research, educate, and preserve


Josiah Kirby Lilly, benefactor of the Foster Hall Collection, in a photo of a 1941 painting by Malcolm Purcell. University of Kentucky, Samuel M. Wilson Photographic Collection.

Interior, Stephen Foster Memorial. Photo by Tom Powers.

Exterior of the Stephen Foster Memorial.University of Pittsburgh Library System, Center for American Music, Foster Hall Collection.

Learn More Online Find out more about the Stephen Foster

Memorial Museum and the University of Pittsburgh’s Foster Hall Collection.

http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/foster.htm

materials related to Foster’s life and career

and has worked on many high-profile Foster

projects over the years, including a critical

edition of his complete works, numerous

documentaries on his life, and a Grammy-

award winning album of his songs.42

The reasons for sustained interest in

Stephen Foster are complex, just as are the

changing interpretations of Foster’s lyrics, but

much like the city that strongly influenced

his writing, the songs have at their heart a

distinctly American quality. As musicologist

Charles Hamm put it in his book Yesterdays:

Popular Song in America, “Never before, and

rarely since, did any music come so close

to being a shared experience for so many

Americans.”43 Foster’s music speaks to what

it means to live in a country that was shaped

by innovation and industry, advantageous

geography, and creative and hardworking

people. The American experience—and, more

specifically, the Pittsburgh experience—may

have changed over the years in certain ways,

but the same qualities define the region and

continue to make it unique. This is at the

heart of why Foster’s songs still resonate:

they, like the land bisected by rivers and the

neighborhoods divided by cultures, still reflect

who we are today.

Kathryn Miller Haines is the Associate Director

for the Center for American Music at the

University of Pittsburgh. Among its holdings

is the Foster Hall Collection, which continues

to be the principal repository for all materials

pertaining to Stephen Collins Foster.

Visit http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus to learn

about Foster and the Center.

1 Charles Dickens to John Forster, April 4, 1842. Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1842-1843 (Oxford University Press, 1974). Dickens commented in his “American Notes,” “Pittsburg [sic] is like Birmingham in England; at least its towns-people say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its ironworks” (153-154).

2 Stephen Foster to Ann Eliza Foster, September 15, 1845. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

3 Lynne Connor, Pittsburgh In Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 3.

4 Ibid., 28.5 John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster America’s

Troubadour (New York City: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1953), 115.

6 Edward LeRoy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy: from “Daddy” Rice to Date (Kenny Publishing Company, 1911), 6.

7 Morrison Foster, My Brother Stephen (Indianapolis: privately printed, 1932), 25.

8 Stephen Foster to E.P. Christy, June 12, 1851. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Ca.

9 Stephen Foster to E.P. Christy, May 25, 1852. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

10 “Philadelphia’s First Pianos and the Lure of Music,” Philadelphia Antiques Week.Com, April 20, 2012, accessed February 28, 2014. http://www.philadelphiaantiquesweek.com/2012/04/02/philadelphias-first-pianos-and-the-lure-of-music/.

11 William B. Foster to William B. Foster, Jr., September 3, 1841. Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

12 Richard Wetzel, Frontier musicians on the Connoquenessing, Wabash, and Ohio: A history of the music and musicians of George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1805-1906 (Ohio University Press, 1976), 85.

13 Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 50.

14 George Grove and Waldo Selden Pratt, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (MacMillan, 1920), 6:334.

15 Stephen Foster to William B. Foster, Jr., “late 1840 or early 1841.” Foster Hall Collection, Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

16 Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York City: W.W. Norton, 1979), 215-222.

17 Morrison Foster, 31. 18 Pittsburgh Music History at https://sites.google.com/

site/pittsburghmusichistory/pittsburgh-music-story/teachers-and-schools/henry-kleber.

19 Evelyn Foster Morneweck, Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1944), 2:402.

20 Howard, 133.21 Ibid., 232-233.22 Larry Glasco, The WPA History of the Negro in

Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 104.

Portrait of Foster by George Lafayette Clough, c. 1865.Carnegie Museum of Art. Photo by Richard Stoner.


23 Fletcher Hodges, Jr., “Stephen Foster Democrat,” Lincoln Herald 47, no. 2 (June 1945): 4.

24 Len Barcousky, “Recounting Abraham Lincoln’s only trip to Pittsburgh, 150 years ago The president-elect arrived by train 150 years ago on Valentine’s Day before inauguration,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 13, 2011.

25 Charles Dahlinger, “Abraham Lincoln in Pittsburgh and the Birth of the Republican Party,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 3, no. 4 (October 1920): 166.

26 Frederick Douglass, “The Anti-Slavery Movement, lecture delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, January, 1855,” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York City: International Publishers, 1950), 2:356-357.

27 John Newton Boucher, A Century and a Half of Pittsburg and Her People (The Lewis Publishing Company, 1908). For more on the Civil War, see Arthur B. Fox, Pittsburgh During the American Civil War, 1860-1865 (Chicora, Pa.:Mechling Bookbindery, 2002).

28 Samuel P. Bates, Martial Deeds of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: T. H. Davis & Co., 1876).

29 Stephen Collins Foster, “A Soldier in the Colored Brigade” (New York City: Firth, Son & Co., 1863).

30 Emerson, 11.31 National Magazine, Heart Songs Dear to the

American People (Boston: Chapple Publishing Co. Ltd, 1909).

32 “No Letup,” Time Magazine, January 27, 1941.33 For more information on Foster’s extensive use in

these mediums, see his entry on the Internet Movie Database website, imdb.com.

34 Morneweck, 2:593.

35 Vernon Gay and Marilyn Evert, Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983).

36 Kloman was also a partner of Henry Phipps and Andrew Carnegie. At the time he tore down the Foster home, he was also in the process of openining the Union Iron Mills in the Strip District, later the site of Crucible Steel. See David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (London: Penguin Press, 2006).

37 “Pictorial Biography of Stephen Collins Foster Part II,” Musical Courier, no. 13 (March 29, 1930): 40.

38 For these and other memorials to Foster in Pittsburgh and beyond, see the section on memorials in Calvin Elliker’s Stephen Collins Foster: A Guide to Research (New York City: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988).

39 “Pittsburgh Honors Foster: City Celebrates Centenary of Composer’s Birth at Lawrenceville,” New York Times, July 5, 1926, 23.

40 For a detailed description of the creation, history, and activities of the Memorial, see Fletcher Hodges, Jr.’s, article “A Pittsburgh Composer and His Memorial,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 21, no. 2 (June 1938).

41 Ibid.42 Deane Root and Steven Saunders, editors, The Music

of Stephen C. Foster: A Critical Edition (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian University Press, 1990). Root is currently Director of the Center for American Music and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Among the documentaries is the PBS American Experience episode, “Stephen Foster.” The Grammy-winning album is Various Artists, Beautiful Dreamer. American Root Publishing, 2004.

43 Hamm.

“My Old Kentucky Home” retained enough of its anti-slavery

origins to prompt Frederick Douglass to laud it and other Foster songs for awakening

sympathies for the slave.


Statue of Foster and Old Uncle Ned by Guiseppe Moretti.

Photo by Justin M. Postrick.

Learn More Online Learn more about Stephen Foster the songwriter and listen to samples of his music

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