Stephen Foster's music Is part of every Americans culture, wrote
composer Virgil Thomson, and certainly this is true, for few American
composers have created songs as lastingly popular as Beautiful Dreamer,
Oh! Susanna, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, Swanee River (properly
Old Folks at Home), Camptown Races, and My Old Kentucky Home, Good
Night. The fact remains, however, that Foster's melodies have suffered
continually at the hands of revisers and arrangers, so that often whet
we hear today is only a corrupt version of what Foster actually
composed.
This book corrects that situation by assembling 40 songs as Foster
originally wrote them. Many have been reproduced from original
first-edition sheets, others from early editions, others from facsimiles
of first editions. All are reproduced with their covers, to help capture
the flavor of the period. Along with the old favorites listed above you
will find The Glendy Burk, Ah! May the Red Rose Live Always, Massa's in
de Cold Ground, Old Dog Tray, Old Black Joe, Nelly Bly, and 28 more.
Among these are patriotic songs about the Civil War, plantations slave
songs written in dialect, minstrel songs written for traveling companies
-- most notably the original Christy Minstrels, and the soft, easy,
sentimental ballads that have endeared Foster's music to so many for so
long.
Musicologically this volume is an important contribution to the
reevaluation of Foster's work. It will also help bring people a little
closer to the original work of one of America's best-loved composers.
The text by Richard Jackson, head of the Americana Collection of the
Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, New York Public Library,
covers Foster's life and music and gives a short critical examination of
each piece reproduced in this book.
