Songwriter Story

Songwriter Story

STEPHEN FOSTER, AMERICA'S TROUBADOUR--John Tasker Howard--Crowell ($3.50). In a 70-year-old ledger in Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital can be found the record of the death of Stephen Foster. The No. 1 U. S. songwriter, thin and wasted at 37, had fallen in his Bowery rooming-house, cut his throat, bashed his forehead. News papers took scant notice of the passing of the man who wrote "Old Folks at Home," "Massa's in de Cold Ground," "Nelly Ely," "Oh! Susanna," "Old Black Joe," "My Old Kentucky Home." Author John Tasker Howard, an expert on U. S. music, gives him 429 pages in a book cramful of documents, statistics and sidelights on the songwriting business in the mid-19th Century. Pittsburgh, not the South he wrote most about, was the home of Stephen Foster. Author Howard traces his love for Negro music to a "bound" black girl in the Foster household who used to take him to shouting colored meetings, to the early minstrel shows for which Foster wrote many of his songs. Edwin P. Christy, famed Mr. Bones, was his steadiest customer. He paid Foster $10.00 for the privilege of first singing "Oh! Susanna" which became the marching song for the California gold rush, $15.00 for "Old Folks at Home" because Foster let him sign himself as composer. "Old Folks at Home" started originally as "Way Down Upon de Pedee ribber." "Pedee" did not quite suit Foster. His brother suggested the Yazoo but that seemed harsh. Together they scoured the Atlas, picked on the Suwanee River in Florida. Foster's songs earned him $15,091, a rich amount for the times. But Foster drank up much of it and his wife had to get a job as a telegrapher. During his last years publishers were eager to get Foster's songs and he turned them out rapidly, wrote them on wrapping paper, if there was nothing else handy.

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