Word: stephen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Stephen L. Higgins & wife of Sanford plopped calmly out on a Maine tidal flat, began blitzing the bivalves with a common rubber suction plunger (the kind used on a stuffed-up toilet). cIn the time it takes an uninitiated digger to gather several dozen clams, the Higgins had two bushels of them (current price: $4 a bushel...