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.