Weep No More

Boston Brahmins and New York classicists dismissed Old Black Joe and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair as melodious trash, and urged Stephen Collins Foster to write symphonies. But the forty-niners sang Oh! Susanna all the way to California, and Union soldiers harmonized My Old Kentucky Home around their campfires while Confederates sang Old Folks at Home. The songs became America's folk music. Yet the Pittsburgh tunesmith who wrote them is often remembered, in confused popular legends, as a penniless drunk who died in a Bowery flophouse.

Now, in Chronicles of Stephen Foster's Family (University of Pittsburgh Press; 2 vols., $5), Stephen's niece, Evelyn Foster Morneweck, presents a corrected portrait--of a musician who loved his wife & child, paid his taxes, and wrote a temperance song called Comrades, Fill No Glass for Me.

Way Down Upon de Pedee. As every "Believe It or Not" reader knows, Stephen Foster never lived farther south than Cincinnati. He got his love of Negro music from a mulatto servant girl in the household.

He wrote Old Uncle Ned, the first of his famed slave songs (Old Folks at Home, My Old Kentucky Home, Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground) for a glee club which he directed. His marriage to Jane McDowell produced two great songs: Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, in her honor; and Old Black Joe, celebrating the McDowell family butler. For $15 Foster sold the performing rights to his greatest-selling song, Old Folks at Home. It started as Way Down Upon de Pedee Ribber but Stephen, not liking the sound of that, consulted an atlas and discovered Florida's Suwannee River. Minstrel Edwin P. Christy even brought the right to list himself as composer. Yet, in all, Stephen's 200 songs earned him some $15,000, which wasn't bad for those days.

Politics & Potboilers. This exhaustive biography is valuable for the documentation it gives of Stephen Foster's politics. He wrote sentimental songs about the slaves, but did not believe they could be freed. His Pittsburgh family were fairly well-to-do (one brother was vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad) and strong Democrats. James Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, was a relative by marriage, and for him Foster in 1856 wrote two campaign songs.

It was quite a blow to Stephen when Lincoln's Republicans sang a parody on Democrat Stephen Douglas set to Stephen's Old Uncle Ned:

There was a little man, and his name

was Stevy Doug...

His legs they were short, but his

speeches were long,

And nothing but himself he could see

... for a thirsty little sould was he!

After Lincoln was elected, Stephen who continued to hate that man in the White House, set to music his sister Henrietta's Sound the Rally:

The dictator Lincoln has put us under

ban... we are no longer free,

Unl;ess we stop the despot whio strikes at

liberty.

By this time Stephen had become morose, and something of a drinker. Within five years seven members of his family died, including his mother & father. He moved to New York, where he wrote furiously to support his family and to earn money for drink. In 1863-- his last and most prolific year-- he wrote 46 songs most of them religious potboilers. (Little Ella's an Angel in the Skies, Willie's Gone to Heaven). That same year, he also wrote Beautiful Dreamer, hsi most poignant ballad.

Henry Ford's Mistake. The Chronicles are the work of two generations of Fosters. Stephen's brother, Morrison, devoted the last years of his life to collecting hundreds of letters. Morrison's daughter, Mrs. Morneweck, a Detriot housewife, spent ten years incorporating them into her story.

Mrs. Morneweck's biography contains ten full-page maps to prove that the house in which Stephen Foster was born in 1826 was razed in the 1860's, and that the "birthplace" which Industrialist Henry Ford moved to Dearborn (Mich.) in 1934 was never occupied by Stephen. But some of her documentation, as with most family histories, has an atmosphere of apolgia.

Manhattan's New England Hotel in the Bowery, where Stephen died in January 1864, Mrs. Morneweck writes, was really quite a nice hotel. And the gash in Stephen's neck at his death was not self-inflicted, she says, but suffered in a fall against a broken washbowl.

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