{"id":1030,"date":"2026-07-02T22:43:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1030"},"modified":"2026-07-02T22:43:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:43:03","slug":"the-man-who-invented-american-popular-music-turns-200","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1030","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Invented American Popular Music Turns 200"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of <\/i>The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

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Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.<\/p>\n

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was\u2014nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin\u2014but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like \u201cOh! Susanna,\u201d \u201cCamptown Races,\u201d and \u201cOld Folks at Home\u201d remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?<\/p>\n

Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the interest nor aptitude for business or much else, but he managed to find a niche writing songs, often either for minstrel bands or to be sold as sheet music. \u201cAll he had was his ability to create poetry and melody and put them together,\u201d Deane L. Root, a professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. By doing that, he created the model for the professional songwriters who have followed\u2014Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown\u2019s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville\u2019s Music Row, and modern-day hitmakers such as Max Martin.<\/p>\n

The guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster\u2019s music since the early 1990s and even named a group \u201cBeautiful Dreamers\u201d after the Foster composition, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. \u201cIt\u2019s just the perfect model for what a melody and the form of a song can be,\u201d he told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a million other composers, but just thinking of popular-song form, in a way this seems like ground zero for so much stuff that we have now.\u201d Frisell has recorded \u201cHard Times\u201d as both a rollicking swing tune and a wistful lament, which he said is a testament to the song\u2019s craftsmanship. \u201cThe melody just gets so deep down in you. It\u2019s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of the tree, and then you can start climbing around up there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musical skill, then as now, was not enough to guarantee financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a major hit with \u201cOh! Susanna\u201d in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to earn a consistent living, making $10 to $15 a song\u2014$400 to $500 today. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have an agent, he didn\u2019t have a lawyer who could work this for him. He didn\u2019t have somebody who knew the business on his behalf, writing up contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,\u201d Root said. Foster died destitute in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in the bathroom of a hotel on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to legend, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.<\/p>\n

Foster\u2019s songs became ubiquitous\u2014people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime\u2014and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became best known only after his death, thanks to a fierce reputation-building effort by his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others formed ASCAP, now the leading performance-rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

Speaking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he\u2019d lain awake the night before we spoke, thinking about how difficult it was to discuss. The leading popular music of the era was minstrelsy, which, as the musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Took Over the World<\/i>, \u201cpresented the version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.\u201d White minstrel musicians would either commercialize Black culture (a pattern that persists in popular music) or else perform exaggerated stereotypes of it. Many of Foster\u2019s songs were written for Christy\u2019s Minstrels, a major minstrel troupe of the 1840s and 1850s that performed in blackface, and his lyrics traffic in slurs, pro-Confederate sentiments, and revisionism about the horrors of slavery, even though he\u2019d witnessed it himself. (Foster\u2019s personal politics are tough to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and he seems to have been most interested in getting a paycheck.)<\/p>\n

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\u201cMy Old Kentucky Home\u201d is that commonwealth\u2019s state song, and it\u2019s a staple of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass praised the song for awakening abolitionist sentiments. Yet the words also include a slur that was sanitized in 1986\u2014jarringly late. Some of the many Looney Tunes<\/i> segments that feature his music were later withdrawn from circulation because of their offensive material. But the great Black bass-baritone and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded \u201cMy Old Kentucky Home\u201d in its unexpurgated form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.<\/p>\n

The musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American songs, told me that discussing Foster\u2019s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. \u201cI don\u2019t know if he was any more racist than the average person\u201d of his time, she said. \u201cHe was just trying to make a buck.\u201d She finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than who he was as an individual.<\/p>\n

For a May concert at Carnegie Hall, part of commemorations of the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary, she closed a set with \u201cHard Times.\u201d Giddens doesn\u2019t perform Foster\u2019s music much, looking to spotlight lesser-known work, but she decided it was the right piece for the moment. For me and for many others, it\u2019s Foster\u2019s finest work. The song is untainted by dialect, with a memorable tune and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a salve during recent hard times. Whatever the flaws of Foster and his music, Giddens said, \u201cThe man could write a tune.\u201d When she and her backing group played \u201cHard Times,\u201d it brought down the house, just as it has done for some 170 years now.<\/p>\n

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