Word: stephen
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...sung so long & loud that 63 years later the Virginia Conservation Commission wanted it made Virginia's official State anthem. Few singers of the song knew or cared who wrote it. If the question ever came up, someone usually said it was one of famed U. S. Songwriter Stephen Foster's (Swanee River, Oh! Susanna! etc.). Fame never caught up with black Songwriter Bland, but death did: in 1911 he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in a corner of Merion, Pa.'s scrubby little Negro cemetery...
...many of them today either unpublished or unidentified. The best of them (Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, In the Morning by the Bright Light, In the Evening by the Moonlight, etc.) stood high in the list of bestsellers. Today's music connoisseurs are beginning to call Bland "the Negro Stephen Foster," to rate him after Foster as the second greatest U. S. writer of Southern songs. During his lifetime, Minstrel Bland called himself, more modestly, "the best Ethiopian song writer in the world...
Significance. Strangest fact about Miss Ravenel's Conversion is that it has been forgotten for so long. Battle scenes like the storming of Port Hudson are superior to those of Stephen Crane; the humor, bewilderment and passion of Miss Lillie make Hawthorne's and Cooper's damsels seem moral abstractions. Although, in its 466 pages, the book sometimes seems labored, and antiquated asides slow down its fast story, De Forest's wit picks it up, springs out in the plain talk of soldiers, his comments on the appallingly dull conversations of people in love...
...these fine houses from the Revolution to the present have passed nearly all the famed social arbiters and artists of U. S. history. Rev. Thomas Skinner sat for Telegraph Inventor-Painter Samuel F. B. Morse; National Academy President Daniel Huntington painted Bishop Henry C. Potter; Alexander James did Admiral Stephen B. Luce, who inaugurated modern naval training; George Peter Alexander Healy produced a famous likeness of Mrs. August Belmont. While John Singer Sargent had a whack at several bigwigs of a later day, and contemporary painters filled in the gaps...
Sweden's greatest song writer was Carl Michael Bellman (1740-95). To Swedes Bellman's ballads are as familiar as Stephen Foster's are in the U. S. Year ago Hendrik Willem van Loon, literary journeyman, heard some, resolved to investigate the "Anacreon of the North," the "Last of the Troubadours." Last year van Loon and Grace Castagnetta, U. S. pianist spent five months in Sweden, acquainting themselves with Bellman's background and with the Swedish language which, in his songs, is almost untranslatably idiomatic. This week they published the result: 20 songs, with piano accompaniment...