Why Do We Celebrate Stephen Foster Memorial Day Each January 13?

By Anne Destabelle

Foster commemorative stamp in the Famous American Composers series, 1940, image courtesy of Wikipedia

President Harry Truman in October 1951 dedicated the date of January 13 to commemorate Stephen Foster, the Father of American music. Stephen passed away in 1864. It took only 87 years for our country to acknowledge his greatness! The day was only made official in 1966, another 15 years later. Many cities in our nation organize special events in his honor.

***By Unknown author - Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16562493***

There are memorials at Foster Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida, at the University of Pittsburgh, the Stephen Foster State Park in Georgia and at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburg, PA, to name a few.

If you can’t visit these great places, you can find a virtual tour online.

Only in 1970 was he inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Only in 2010 was he inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Stephen died penniless, abandoned by his family and alone at the age of 37 in Bellevue Hospital, New York. He left behind a massive musical legacy.

Stephen Foster was born on July 4, 1826. Also on that very same day both former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died!

**Stephen Foster Monument by** **Giuseppe Moretti** **(1900)**

Stephen was born the 9th and last child to a prosperous Pennsylvania family. His songs were hugely popular in the years just before our Civil War. Most Americans don’t know he even wrote them and that he is considered the Father of American music.

“WAY DOWN UPON THE SWANEE RIVER”

Most people identify Foster’s songs with the South. Stephen was a Northerner!

But he could FEEL the South! Born and educated in Pennsylvania, he only visited the South once -- on his honeymoon!

While his mother’s family were well off plantation owners, his father was a politician and land speculator. He managed to lose the family fortune through bad investment and heavy drinking. The loss of the family home and their prosperous life when Stephen was very young had a huge effect on him. It is said he never recovered from those insecurities and those feelings are reflected in many of his songs.

Stephen found sadness and fragility in all families – Black AND White. That sadness inspired him to write “ Way Down Upon The Yazoo River.” Then he changed it to “Way Down Upon The Pedee River.” Nobody liked that either. In an atlas, he found the name “Suwanee” – a river stretching from Georgia to Florida. At the age of 18, he took a river he’d never seen and made it famous throughout the world.

The song is the official state song of Florida.

“OH, SUSANNA”

By the age of 13, Stephen was a musical prodigy. He had two teachers: a classical German musician AND an entertainer who made his living in traveling circuses as a clown and blackface singer! Both inspired him.

Blackface was the rock and roll of its day. Americans loved it. “OH, SUSANNA” became the greatest hit the world had ever known. He became famous worldwide.

Oh Susanna” is a song about 2 separated black lovers. In it a slave expresses his longing for a lost love. But Stephen had sold his song to the Christy minstrels. He had no control over their portrayal of his songs – or how they manipulated the lyrics. Their interpretation was not his own.

“MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME”

Stephen wrote My Old Kentucky Home, when his popularity was at its peak.

The country’s debates about slavery were intense. This song fanned the flames for abolitionists, inspiring Harriet Beecher Stowe to write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The song also outraged slaveholders – in the North and the South. It was President Lincoln’s favorite song. It later became the Kentucky state song in 1928! At the Kentucky Derby, they play this song as horses are led to the post parade at Churchill Downs!

“OLD BLACK JOE”

Joe was a real person, a favorite servant in his wife Jane’s Pennsylvania home. At her request, Stephen memorialized Joe in this song. I think of it as a secular hymn, praising the noble spirit of the laborer at the end of his life.

“NELLY BLY”

Nelly Bly was a servant in his own family’s household. She loved to hear Stephen sing. He loved her name!

This song was later adapted as a campaign song for Abraham Lincoln! It is a song of contentment and plenty. "Nelly Bly" anticipates the joys of marriage and housekeeping – something NOT ALL women can identify with! Imagine kitchen maids, singing and playing their banjos as they sweep the floor, stoke the fire, and cook the meals.

I DREAM OF JEANIE”

Stephen met and married Jane after a one month courtship! Her widowed mother had 6 daughters to raise. Jane as eager to escape. At 20, Jane was practical, conventional and not at all musical. Stephen was 23. His song writing was at its peak, publishing 16 songs in 1850 and 16 in 1851. He had, however, given the rights to his songs away to support himself and family.

He spent his evenings out, playing music and drinking till early morning. Baby Marion’s arrival and their spiritual incompatibility caused Jane to flee with her baby back to her family. Stephen yearned for the middle class life of respectability with wife and child but sought out the life of the Bohemian – the dreamer.

Heartbroken, he wrote “I Dream of Jeanie.” He sold the rights to this song as well. Neither he nor his family ever saw any royalties from another of the world’s most famous songs.

“NELLIE WAS A LADY”

We know that his songs were loved and sung by Blacks AND Whites in the South.

He was conflicted – he sympathized with the slaves themselves but he tolerated slavery as a way to preserve the Union.

Nellie was the wife of his family’s black boatman. No songwriter in America had ever called an African American woman a lady before. In this song, he portrays this lady with dignity and grace and conveys her husband’s grief at losing her.

“HARD TIMES COME AGAIN NO MORE”

Stephen’s handwritten music contracts were the very first between American music publishers and individual songwriters.

There were no musical lawyers to help him out back then! Stephen gave away his performance rights to all of his music. That left him always impoverished.

Some people got rich, though - Edwin P. Christy, his benefactor, and those Christy Minstrels!

Stephen actually DID write the first American song of political protest. There were raging economic debates in 1854 – the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. In addition, Charles Dickens had just published his novel, HARD TIMES.

Stephen visited a Black church. It was a place where free Blacks AND slaves worshipped. “Hard times” were upon him – and everyone- in full force. He wrote the famous “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

“BEAUTIFUL DREAMER”

Stephen moved to New York’s Tin Pan Alley. His songs were world famous. Not him, though. He had had no hit in 7 years. He had even sold future rights to his songs to survive. His mother died of stroke. Six months later, his father died, and then his beloved brother William from TB. The Civil War was raging.

At his death at age 37 in 1864 at Bellevue Hospital in NY, he had 38 cents in his pocket and a scribbled note with the words “dear friends and gentle hearts.” They were lyrics for a new song, never to be written.

After his death, his wife Jane found and published “Beautiful Dreamer.” In it, he escapes the bitter realities of his loneliness and his poverty. He had written what would become one of the most famous songs the world has known and loved.

Of his 286 works of music, “Beautiful Dreamer” best expresses his nature.

CONCLUSION

In my Pennyroyal musical tribute to Stephen Foster, www.pennyroyalplayers.org, we present Stephen’s life and songs in the context of the time in which he lived.

He was actually progressive, embracing universal human values concerning the sanctity of family, the comfort of friends and loved ones as one grows old, the necessity of determining one’s own future, the right to live in dignity and to die in peace.

My production honors the man and his music, with his life story told through his own eyes and those of his mother, his wife, his sisters and his brothers. I hope to share these beautiful songs and his story with you one day!

You’ll find three Hollywood movies, Harmony Lane, Swanee River, I Dream of Jeanie in tribute to him. His face is on the 1935 silver half dollar. You could visit My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Kentucky. There’s a lake, a museum AND a statue in Pennsylvania, along with an annual Stephen Foster music festival.

Anne Destabelle retired from two long careers in Children’s Dependency Services and then in Contracts at Hughes Electronics. She and husband Ray have 3 adult children. She loves music, theatre, tennis, bridge, mahjongg, long walks with her daughter, Dawn, great books and traveling.

One of her greatest new joys in life is collaborating musically with her talented daughter Dawn Curry, the newest member of the Pennyroyal Players.

Anne created, leads and plays guitar with the Pennyroyal Players, donating over $170,000 to charities since 2004. The group was awarded City of Torrance’s Excellence in Arts for Music for 2017. The group was recently awarded Palos Verdes Peninsula Coordinating Council Award for 2020.

Anne sings first soprano with Los Cancioneros Master Chorale, organizes and helps direct the LC Master Chorale Small Ensembles, raising funds for the Chorale. Anne also sang with the prestigious LA Vocal Core, an elite choral group directed by Kathy Jensen till Kathy’s retirement.

Anne can be found giving a weekly piano concert at Torrance Memorial Hospital and also at Caring House, a home for end of life patients. Piano is another passion.

Anne is a member of the Peninsula Committee for the LA Philharmonic. She and Ray are major sponsors of the Norris Jazz Fanatics and members of BRAVO and ACT III at the Norris.

Anne actively supports American Association of University Women through annual donations to Tech Trek and participation in the interest groups within AAUW. She directed Readers Theatre for many years before creating the Pennyroyal Players.

Anne and Ray are members of the Associates at Caltech. They are members of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Village which supports seniors remaining in their own homes as we age.

On June 26, 2021, Anne debuted her latest musical comedy, THE SUFFRAGE MUSICAL: FROM BATTLES TO BALLOTS- A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE at the request of the League of Women Voters in honor of the Centennial of women’s right to vote.

Visit www.PennyroyalPlayers (See all 9 programs)

Watch https://youtu.be/yMoeUwv2ymQ (City of Torrance Award Video 2018)

Watch https://youtu.be/OnNL-SeUDv8 Nelly Was A Lady (by Stephen Foster)

Watch https://youtu.be/M6FX5F8_uFY (Link to Pennyroyal Dawn Curry’s “O Holy Night.”)

Watch https://youtu.be/5H4ZDkHAOW0 (Link to Holiday Video December 2020 performed 5 times on zoom during Covid)