Swanee - The Music of Stephen Foster

Produced by Joe WeedBack to Recordings

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Overview

Why Stephen Foster in the 21st century? Biographer Ken Emerson says in Doodah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture: “Stephen Foster is at the heart of the tangled, tortuous interchange between whites and blacks that both dishonors America and yet distinguishes its culture worldwide... Foster is so absorbed in the air that we breathe and in the airs that we hum...that an America without Foster is as unthinkable as an America without Whitman or Twain, without Louis Armstrong or George Gershwin.”

Copyright © 2000 by Joe Weed, All Rights Reserved

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Liner Notes

This CD comes with a 20-page booklet about Foster's life and music. The booklet reflects the latest research about Foster and his life and place in American pop culture.

Foster was born on the 4th of July, 1826-- the day our new democracy turned 50, the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. Times were hard. During Foster’s early years, his family’s living conditions declined. The universal themes Foster brought to his songs—longing for home and the pleasures of old friends and family—were painted firmly on his canvas by his own experiences.

At first, Foster wrote for minstrel shows, the ready venue for his music. But his middle class sensibility and compassion led him to try to elevate the medium. In a letter to minstrel leader E.P. Christy in 1852, Foster criticized the “trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that [minstrel] order."  As Foster matured, he seldom reverted to the blackface dialect used in many of his early songs. Through the veil of the years, his political and racial biases are hard to discern, but some of his humanitarian credentials are unmistakable. His close friend Charles Shiras published an abolitionist newspaper. His wife’s father helped sponsor civil rights activist Martin Delaney at Harvard Medical School.

A stubborn loner, Foster pioneered an unheard-of career—professional songwriter. During his lifetime, and long after his death, his compositions seemed so quintessentially American that they were often assumed to be “traditional.”  His talent, regardless of the historical era in which it was first manifested, produced tunes that continue to amuse, inspire and trouble the conscience of our nation.

Thanks

Special Thanks to: My family, Marti Kendall and Jeff and Katie Kendall-Weed; and in alphabetical order:
Marty and Johnnie Kay Atkinson; Bruce Bowers; Dr. Dale Cockrell; Christina Delaney; Diana Donnelly; Ken Emerson; Alice Heaton and the staff at My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, KY; Rob and Jen Ickes; David Isenberg; Bruce Kaphan; Steve Palazzo; Dr. Deane Root and Kathryn Miller Haines at the Foster Hall Collection in the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Martin C. “Pete” Striegel; Valinda Subic, Jon Kay, Elaine McGrath and the staff at the Stephen Foster State Folk Culture Center in White Springs, FL (on the Suwannee River); Dr. Charles Wolfe