Within Ohree (hords xX —» * Js ‘ = Pi i Fe 2 ; i 4 in 5 ¥ p } Copyright, 1928, by EJ. Wontcemutn | WITHIN THREE CHORDS By E. JAY WOHLGEMUTH The Place of Cincinnati in the Life of STEPHEN CoLuins Foster PAPER READ BEFORE THE LITERARY CLUB OF CINCINNATI THE ROUGH NOTES PRESS INDIANAPOLIS 1928 WITHIN THREE CHORDS T was the year 1847 down on the Public Landing in Cincinnati. All was bustle and excitement as the steam whistle of the big Pittsburgh packet shot out the signal of her approach and she appeared around the bend. Stevedores and roustabouts, white and black, busily engaged in unloading the cargoes of the steamboats that lined the water’s edge, over the rude gangways, paused in their work to watch her as she neared the bank and cast out her “stages.” A young man, slender and handsome, with reg- ular and striking features and his eyes shining with eagerness, stood in the throng and as her passengers hurried ashore he grasped one of them, a youth of his own age, by the arm and, hardly waiting for the exchange of greetings, exclaimed: “Billy, I’ve got a dandy new one; let’s go up to the store and try it.” They climbed the steep bank and entered the office of Irwin & Foster, in old Cassilly’s Row; then, tak- ing down his flute, the youth played for the first time to an auditor, the sweet strains of the serenade, “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.” The young man was Stephen Collins Foster, the author of “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Black Joe,” [3] WITHIN THREE CHORDS “My Old Kentucky Home,” and many other of the best known American native songs, whose title as “the world’s greatest song-writer” is finding accept- ance as the true measure of his achievement is recog- nized and he fits into his place in American race and folk history and literature. This story of the origin of “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” was related to the writer in Pittsburgh by a friend of “Billy” Hamilton, Foster's life-long friend, who had it from Hamilton’s own lips before he died; Hamilton having been a member of the quartette in Pittsburgh who first sang many of the songs produced by Foster both before and after he began to write professionally for Christy's Minstrels and his publishers. * And he further related that that same night in Cincinnati they hastily improvised a quartette and went out to the homes of their friends in the city, where they produced the new serenade so success- fully and were regaled and rewarded so generously, that when they returned to spend the remainder of the night on the boat they were scarcely able to help one another over the gangway and into their berths. Cincinnati’s place in the life of Stephen Foster is *I give this story as it was related to me, without investigation of other versions as to how and where the serenade was written. [4] Wert ttiN THREE CHORDS a large one but it has not been recognized either by Cincinnatians or in the few fragmentary sketches and biographies that have been written of his life. He was born in Pittsburgh, lived in Cincinnati from his twentieth to his twenty-third year, and died in New York when not yet thirty-eight years old. His work was done within a comparatively few years. Besides his actual residence for three years here during the impressionable and formative period of his life, he made a number of trips to Cincinnati and as far as New Orleans on his brother’s steam- ers. Many of his inspired native songs and planta- tion melodies, which comprise the largest collection of “immortals” that may be credited to a single author, show the influence of the Cincinnati period of his life. It was a Pittsburgh, not a Cincinnati writer who said in the Gazette-Times of October 18, 1914, that Foster, “although born in Pittsburgh, belonged to the middle west of the country border- ing the Ohio River, where he spent most of his time.” While this may be an exaggeration, it may be said that Cincinnati was the place where his genius came to bud, where many of his impressions were formed and that to a large extent this city furnished the environment which not only made Foster, but the Lou WITHIN THREE CHORDS whole school of native songs which he founded, possible. Stephen Foster's life outwardly was uneventful. He was born July 4, 1826, came to Cincinnati from his home in Pittsburgh in the year 1846, at the age of 20, to work in his brother Dunning’s office on Front street. He remained here three years, returned to Pittsburgh in 1849, married in 1850 Miss Jane McDowell, daughter of a prominent surgeon there, and moved the next year to New York to be near his publishers. He remained there a short time and returned to Pittsburgh, where in a little home in Allegheny he wrote many of his songs. In 1860 he returned to New York where he died January 13, 1864, in an obscure hotel where he had been living, . alone and forsaken by his family and friends. He died, in fact, as a result of a cut in his face from an ice-pitcher received while attempting to dress him- self when in a weakened condition; he swooned and his face struck against the pitcher, cutting a small artery, from which he bled to death. He produced altogether 175 songs. Some besides those already mentioned are: ““Massa’s in the Cold Ground”; the great Civil War song, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thov- sand More”; “Old Dog Tray”; “Uncle Ned”; [6] WITHIN THREE CHORDS “There’s a Good Time Coming”; “Hard Times Come Again No More’’; “Nellie Bly”; Nelly Wasa Lady”; “Camptown Races”; “Louis’ana Belle”; “Beautiful Dreamer”; “I See Her Still in My Dreams’; ““When This Dreadful War Is Ended,” a popular Civil War song; “Willie, We Have Missed You,” of which 150,000 were sold up to 1880; and “Laura Lee.” [7 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS N the Forties the Public Landing was the most conspicuous and important center of the city. The firm of Irwin & Foster were steamboat agents and commission merchants, at first located at No. 4 Cassilly’s Row and afterwards at 22 Broadway, be- tween Pearl and Second streets. A picture in Dr. Goss’s history shows this old row, which in later years was known as “Rat Row.” But in Foster's time it was the pick of locations, especially for a river business. There were sixteen steamboat and commission agencies listed in the city directory of 1846 and they were nearly all in this section. Old residents no doubt recall this row of buildings which was torn down some years ago to make way for the L. & N. railroad tracks. Only the rear of the row was on East Front street, but the offices and stores extended through from the real front, which was known as Giffin street. These stores were four stories high on the river side and three stories high on the Front street side. Number Four was pre- sumably the fourth store from the corner of Front and Broadway. The river front of course presented the most lively and varied appearance imaginable. From [8 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS Main to Walnut it used to be known as Gilmour’s Landing and from Broadway to Ludlow it was Wiggins’ Landing. The Public Landing was be- tween. There were no wharfboats, but “stages” were rigged and thrown out from the boats to the shore to form a gangway. The Directory of 1849 lists the firm of C. & W. Cassilly as commission merchants at the corner of Broadway and Front streets. Morrison Foster in his biography of his brother has this paragraph: “While in Cincinnati he met Miss Sophie Marshall, the grand-daughter of Michael P. Cassilly of that city, a former Pittsburgher, who was an old friend of our family. Miss Marshall possessed a beautiful soprano voice and sang with much grace.” Wil- liams’ Directory of 1849-50 shows Michael P. Cas- silly as living on the west side of Broadway between Third and Fourth in a building next to the present University Club. Stephen Foster himself lived around the corner on Fourth street with his brother Dunning M., and both boarded at Mrs. Jane Grif- fin’s on the south side of Fourth street between Broadway and Ludlow, probably where the Guil- ford School now stands. The directory of 1846 does not show the name of Stephen Foster but it shows that of his brother and also the firm of Irwin [9] % WITHIN THREE CHORDS and Foster. It shows that Dunning M. Foster boarded at the Broadway Hotel at the corner of Broadway and Second street. Mrs. J. Griffin in 1846 conducted a boarding house at the corner of McAllister and Fourth streets. Evidently she later moved across the street for at the time Stephen and Dunning Foster boarded with her, her address is given as on the south side of Fourth street. Morrison Foster says, speaking of 1846, “There was then in Cincinnati in the music business, W. C. Peters, whom Stephen had known in Pittsburgh, and who had taught music in our family.” W. C. Peters published “Oh, Susanna,” “Way Down South” and “Uncle Ned” or “Old Uncle Ned,” the fame of which songs went around the world and both of which were written in Cincinnati. The 1846 directory shows the firm of Peters & Com- pany, music store, on the south side of Fourth street, between Main and Sycamore. The directory of 1849 shows the firm of Peters, Field & Company, pianos and music, 12th and Walnut streets. The directory of 1851 shows the firm as William C. Peters & Son, William C., William M. and Alfred C. Peters, music, pianos and musical merchandise, Melodian Building, corner Fourth and Walnut. The record of the firm of Irwin & Foster is inter- [ 10] MNottIN THREE CHORDS esting in this connection. Archibald R. Irwin was in the steamboat business for himself in 1843 on Broadway between Front and Second streets. When he went into partnership with Dunning M. Foster in 1845, the office was moved into Cassilly’s Row. In 1849 appeared a correction in the addenda of the directory showing that Irwin & Foster, although given in the body of the directory as at 4 Cassilly’s Row, had removed their office to 22 Broadway, between Front and Second streets. In the directory of 1851 all trace of the Fosters had disappeared. That directory shows the firm of Archibald Irwin, Jr. & Company, commission and forwarding mer: chants and steamboat agents, 22 Broadway. {11 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS INCINNATI divides with her sister river city of Pittsburgh the distinction of developing not only Stephen Foster but negro minstrelsy as well. There is a peculiar interweaving of the threads that go into the making of negro minstrelsy and native song writing in the early western environments of these two cities which, connected by the Ohio River, were the centers of the inland empire of America in the forties and fifties when Foster lived among us. It was the publication of “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Uncle Ned,” “Way Down South” and “Oh, Susanna” by a Cincinnati publisher, W. C. Peters, who had formerly taught music in the Foster family in Pittsburgh, which caused him to give up the thought of continuing in business and to become a song writer. Incidentally, the success of his songs published by Mr. Peters enabled the latter to estab lish in Cincinnati one of the large musical publishing house of the west. Sixteen years previously to Foster’s coming to Cincinnati, the actor, W. D. Rice, who is credited with founding the school of negro minstrelsy, had picked up the song, “Jim Crow,” which he first heard sung on the streets in Cincinnati by a negro [ 12 } WHDHIN THREE CHORDS wagon driver and which he later produced at the old Pittsburgh theatre on Fifth street in Pittsburgh, now rebuilt, but then a rude structure of boards. This same W. C. Peters, then a composer, pub lisher and music dealer on Market street in Pitts- burgh, helped Rice whip “Jim Crow” into shape and furnished the pianoforte accompaniment for the song just as it has been published down to the pres- ent time. Peters is thus connected not only with the beginning of negro minstrelsy with Rice but his pay- ment of $100 to Foster for “Oh, Susanna” deter- mined Foster to follow his bent and embark on his song-writing career. It was while Foster was in Cincinnati that a Mr. Andrews of Pittsburgh, who conducted a music hall there, offered a prize of a silver cup for the best orginal negro song and his brother Morrison sent to Stephen a copy of the advertisement urging him to become a competitor. Foster sent from Cincinnati “Way Down South” and while this did not win the cup it was favorably received and gave the timid Foster encouragement to go on. The presidential campaigns of the forties were distinguished by political song singing. A writer on the period says: “Clubs for that purpose were or- ganized in nearly all the cities and towns and ham- [ 13 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS lets—clubs for the platform, clubs for the street, clubs for the parlor, Whig clubs and Democratic clubs. Ballads innumerable to airs indefinite, new and old, filled the land—Irish ballads, German bal- lads, Yankee ballads but preferred over all, negro ballads.” Young Foster, with all this ringing in his ears, his own songs rising out of his heart, awakened to the creative impulse and germinated in this rich soil. In 1849 he returned to Pittsburgh and joined his old circle. The negro airs were still the favorites with his quartette as with other singers but became so worn that Foster offered to write one himself. His success was such that he brought to life his patriotic specimens produced in Cincinnati, and sung to a moderate degree in the drawing rooms of Cincinnati. Doubtless Foster’s friends from Pitts- burgh who had frequently visited Cincinnati, or whom he joined for a trip on the palatial river boats, had taken part in the singing of these songs. His future wife, whom he had met for the first time in Cincinnati, may have helped to sing them there. If Pittsburgh was his native place it was to Cincinnati and the life and environment of which it was the center that he went for his inspiration. In that sense we may claim Foster as our own, as Pittsburgh was [ 14 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS too far from the life of the west to give him much of this first inspiration. In Cincinnati, he was in the midst of it, his ofice work on the river front, his home but two blocks away, his business that of steamboating. His daughter told the writer that he once said that the happiest years of his life were those spent in Cincinnati; it may be some satisfac- tion to us that Cincinnati contributed to his happi- ness and not to the misery which clouded his later life. It is a great thing for the millions who love his songs that Stephen Foster was not born into a strati- fied or static society but in a period of the west’s history when society was yet in the making; he was not born too late to miss the freshness, variety and bloom of life in a forming and richly human and ele- mental society. He came into this wohder country of river life, of western energy and southern ro- mance, a stripling of 20 whose naturally diffident and timid nature made him still less conspicuous than his position as a bookkeeper for one of the numerous shipping firms of the town warranted. And he took it all in from the greatest vantage-point that could be conceived, old Rat Row, overhanging the river’s edge. He spent much of his time on the levee listening to the darkies singing as they loaded [15 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS and unloaded the cargoes from the river craft. He never lived among the negroes, but from his north- ern home in Pittsburgh and his bookkeeper’s desk in Cincinnati he drew song pictures of their poetic life with such insight that had he been a mere prose- writer his master-pen would have depicted life among the lowly as truly and as greatly as did Har- riet Beecher Stowe, his contemporary in Cincinnati while he was here. | I wish that I might picture our young poet as he sat keeping accounts in his brother Dunning’s office in those early days. His brother Morrison, in his sketch of him, says that some of the books still pre- served which he kept show evidence of the greatest diligence and care, but no doubt his poet’s eye many times strayed from its task to the picturesque land- ing and river before him with the Kentucky hills in the distance. There he sat over his tedious bookkeeping, vision- ing the music and lights at night on the great boats as they chugged their way towards the south, the land of his dreams; a world of plantations and bayous, of darkies and their banjoes, singing their plantation songs of their loves and their woes, their burdens and their chains. It is easy to picture the effect of the contrast, in the mind of this imagina- [ 16 } MWeerriN FHREE CHORDS tive, repressed lad from stern Calvinistic stock, intensely practical and freedom-loving, which South- ern life presented, with the life of the “western Puritans,” as they have been called, to which he had been accustomed in Pittsburgh. And we can well understand how in Cincinnati he could write the rollicking song, “Way Down South Whar de Corn Grows,” and when the cruel realities of life had killed his hopes one by one, in later days, he wrote the song “I Cannot Sing Tonight.” He was perhaps thinking of the old happy days in Cincin- nati, after the shadows of despair had cast their wings of impenetrable darkness over the dreams of a poor genius whose best claim during his life to the favor of the world and his friends was that he was a writer of popular and ephemeral ditties and planta- tion melodies. Foster’s life was spent and historical interest cen- ters in the three cities of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and New York. It was the writer’s privilege a few months ago to spend an entire day and evening in Pittsburgh—when he secured or verified much of the data here presented. He went to the Foster homestead; talked with his daughter and grandson; visited the Carnegie Library and went through the newspaper clippings and other references there on fin) WITHIN THREE CHORDS file; and had a pleasant hour with Erasmus Wilson, the veteran river editor of the Gazette-Times, who was the local authority on Foster and who knew intimately “Billy” Hamilton, the life-long friend of Foster, as well as many of the Foster circle, includ- ing his wife. { 18 | WITHIN THREE CHORDS ie delving into the past of our cities, we find always traces of the settler, battling with the rude conditions of frontier life. Colonel William B. Foster, father of Stephen, was one of these early pioneers, and a man of parts. Foster’s early environ- ment consisted of the best home and religious in- fluences of those sturdy days. After he was dead and his fame began to come home to Pittsburgh his brother and his daughter divided the honors of act- ing before the public as the executor of his literary remains. His brother wrote the book which his great-grand-children have sold on the streets and in the office buildings of Pittsburgh as a means of mak- ing a livelihood. The home is practically neglected, as the spas- modic interest of the council of aldermen and the maintenance of an attendant paid for by the city represents’ about all the public interest that is dis- played in the great song-poet, except for the occa- sional visitor. Foster’s granddaughter, who was reared in the home of his wife, Mrs. Matthew B. Wiley, who after his death married again, with her husband and children consented to live in the old [19 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS Foster homestead where Stephen was born, as cus todians, but gave up the labor of love and moved into a house of her own. The home is now occu- pied by the only daughter, Mrs. Marion Foster Welsh, a widow, and her son. The large room at the right as you go in is the relic room. We went into the relic room and found the “guard.” The exhibit of relics was pitifully small; there was the piano donated by Mrs. Mary Kellar Woods. There is a tradition in the family that Fos- ter composed more of his songs on the Woods piano than on his own. It is one of the two pianos im- ported from Germany in 1849, the first pianos that _ found their way west of the Alleghenies. There was an oil painting on the wall of Colonel William B. Foster, another of Stephen Foster and a third of Dunning M. Foster, which was the most interesting of the collection to me, since it was Dunning who brought Stephen to Cincinnati. The Foster Memo- rial Home was opened to the public in 1915. Previ- ously, it had been a boarding house. An attempt was made to get the Carnegie Museum to release the Foster Piano to be placed in the Foster home, but the donor, a gentleman now living in Boston, objected on the ground that if moved there it might be destroyed by fire. [ 20 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS The last surviving member of the Stephen Foster quartette, Mrs. Susan B. Robinson, who died Jan- uary 31, 1916, at the age of 85, was one of the last links connecting Foster with the present. Before her marriage she had been Miss Sue Pentland, famous as a beauty and soprano, and it was to her that Foster dedicated his first success, “Open Thy Lattice, Love.” When Mrs. Robinson died, her son prom- ised that the flute and other mementos including some original Foster manuscripts would, in accord- ance with her wishes, be placed in the Foster Memo rial Home, but it appears that this was not done. Even at an advanced age, Mrs. Robinson enjoyed humming the beautiful ballads which Foster had composed at her mother’s piano. Probably one rea- son why there are no more relics in the Foster home is that there are very few extant even in the homes of the Foster family circle. On the Northside in Allegheny where he lived his home was a very sim- ple one and is now torn down. There are few mementos of Foster that came from it. Mrs. Welsh gave one of the Pittsburgh papers an interview at the time that funds for the Foster Memorial Home were being subscribed. She lived with her father and mother while they were in New York together and although quite young has recol- [21] WITHIN THREE CHORDS lections of that time. He died when she was 12 years old. She says of him, “My father was a very sensitive man and when he went to New York to stay he died there of a broken heart. It was ill treat- ment of this world that ended his life when he was 37 years old. He was a tender-hearted man and always saw deeply into the hearts of others. His plantation songs came purely from the heart. He thought that they might help the colored race. The simple methods were not accidental interpretations, but were original ideas that represented deep and arduous study and analysis of harmonies. He worked all day long at his desk. He was no business man, he would give away anything his friends ad- mired. He was a dreamer and no one understands a dreamer.” The old friends and the old Pittsburgh are gone; a modern industrial city has taken its place. Pitts- burgh has awakened to the importance of Stephen Foster but the interest now aroused has become a historical one only. Foster was not any part of the present Pittsburgh. The older Pittsburgh people hold with a pathetic grasp to the simple old life now overwhelmed by the rush of the great steel center. And yet a Pittsburgh business man said to me: [ 22 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS “Foster's songs have done more good for the world than either Carnegie or Westinghouse.” A clerk in the library stated that requests for information about Foster were constantly growing in number and only a short time before my call had gotten everything possible together regarding him. {23} WITHIN THREE CHORDS ILL NYE said of James Whitcomb Riley that when they were traveling together Riley would sometimes go up to his room in the hotel, lock the door and refuse admittance to anyone, not even receiving food,—unless a bottle of whiskey be con- sidered food. Riley would emerge several hours or a day later exclaiming in a joyful voice, “I’ve got a new one,” and be as proud as a hen with a new- laid egg. Foster’s method was more profound and less hap- hazard. His wife has related to friends the method by which he appeared to work out his melodies. He would sit for hours at his piano, deeply absorbed in his mood, his thoughts in another world, now run- ning his fingers over the keys, now striking a single chord and holding it, listening in his abstracted manner, then trying out perhaps a few notes or an entire little melody; always seeming to be groping and feeling for the angel music which he heard faint and far away and striving to catch and hold it. He would sit thus at the piano until he seemed to have exhausted his mood and then he would come out from his abstraction and would be irritated if any- one touched the piano or if he had even to look at it. [ 24 ] Mt HIN THREE CHORDS Perhaps he would then pick up his flute and go through the same process; and after he had exhaust- ed his second mood with the flute he would likely as not pick up his hat, pass out, and would be gone for the day. So far as the known incidents and events of his life go, his life-current apparently ran along as smoothly as one of his own songs, and as simply, except for his fatal habit. Was there in his life an unsolved mystery, some hidden tragedy, as difficult to fathom, as it is to understand what there is in these almost absurd little pieces of his that touch the heart of the world and open doors that are closed to the great masters? His songs are as soothing as the water bubbling out of a spring, a mother’s croonings to her babe, or the song of the sea to the heart of the mariner. Foster “struck twelve” not once as did other writers, but a dozen times, and must be given the laurel of genius for his production of matchless melodies which came to him as to no other man in his field of artistic expression. Although there is another version of the origin of the song, “Massa’s In The Cold Ground,” here is the one given in a Pittsburgh paper: “It was written in 1852. It was suggested by a scene in Covington, Kentucky, when Foster was in Cincinnati. A num- [25 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS ber of slaves whose master had died huddled together weeping for the death of “Massa” and looking fear- fully into the future, where they might not find so kind an owner, and be separated by purchase of various members of the party by different slave holders.” Another version of the origin of this song was given me by Mr. Erasmus Wilson. He said that Foster’s father had about the place an old southern darkey called “Joe.” When his master died he was very forlorn, and went about the place moaning and crooning to himself, “Ole Mass’s gone; Mass’s in the cold, cold ground; won't see Massa no more.” Foster, with whom this old darkey used to _ play and ride about upon his back, was quick to seize upon it as a cue for the words of a song. This same darkey is credited likewise with furnishing the suggestion for the great song “Old Black Joe.” As Joe grew old he began to think and dream of the future life and of his own best days spent in the south. He was deeply religious as well as supersti- tious and he would go about muttering and talking to himself: “I hear those angel voices callin’, I hear ole massa callin’ and ’se comin—I’se comin’.” This old negro “Joe” and a mulatto girl who used to take Foster as a child to the Methodist church song meetings conducted for members of her race are [ 26 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS credited in Pittsburgh with having been the inspira- tion for his negro melodies, but whatever the occa- sion I prefer to think that their true setting was in the glorious free west of the forties; that in the rush- ing tide of pioneer life westward it was his splendid privilege to give to the world the immortal native songs of a land in the highest tide of its fresh and youthful impulses, best typified in this period by a retiring youth, who enjoyed not the popular acclaim and who sacrificed his family life, his business career, and finally his own life to his unconquerable impulse to write “harmless and smooth running little rhymes and melodies.” This is what the austere and condescending mu- sical critics like to call them. They accord to Foster a certain archness and humor, even a degree of re- finement, not common to his “school”; mostly they treat him in a flippant manner, as one beneath their serious notice. Nowhere is to be found a dignified criticism of the work of the man who, in any true estimate of our precious store of American music, traditions and native sentiments—our folk lore and race history—stands out as Shakespeare among the Elizabethans. The critics have assumed that because Foster’s lyrics are easy to sing they were easy to produce and are simple musically, because elemental. [27 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS A composer assures me that the contrary is the case, that “Old Folks at Home,” for instance, may be sung as ragtime or a funeral dirge or may be ex- panded into grand opera; that, in short, though it may be produced “‘within three chords” of the keys it is a great musical composition. Not being able to quote a satisfactory analysis of the qualities that make Foster’s work enduring and great, may I in- flict upon you a specimen of the criticisms usually found: ‘Folk-songs act through the heart; whatever brains they have are vaporous. You know the trans parent melodies, simple and unobtrusive harmony, the close marriage of words and tones, the ease with which one sits back and listens, the whole working without your assistance; this covers Stephen Foster's style. His subject was scarcely new; the style cer- tainly and essentially from the entity of peoples— and surely a folk-song composer was always on the level of ‘the people.’ Our knowledge of the spon- taneity of writers like Foster must not blind us to the limitations which an unstudied point of view imposed upon them. We may suffer from fluency quite as much as from slowness. There is no special virtue in fluency except that it does not look like work. Foster was fluent; had the easy-going, non- [28 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS revolutionary tendency of the fluent. But it is cer- tain that the facile ‘folk’ idea germinates immediate interpreters of our folk spirit who have a pre- mortem success. This may describe the ordinary popular song writer but it certainly does not describe or account for Foster. We get a better view of Stephen Foster’s emi- nence in his own field when we compare him, not with the writers who have produced popular, ephemeral songs, for there is no comparison, but with other writers of songs that compare with his in quality. Most of our imperishable native and home songs were written for the stage, or for the minstrels. “Home, Sweet Home,” by John Howard Payne, is the most widely known of these great songs, with ‘“Swanee River” by Foster a close second. It was written for the stage and first sung in London in 1823, three years before Stephen Foster was born. Payne wrote only the words, not the music, and with the exception of this one song everything he did has passed into oblivion; yet until recently he has been much better known and more greatly ad- vertised than Foster, who produced both words and melody of a dozen or more songs that live. The [ 29 ] WITHIN, THREE CHORD: little cottage in Easthampton, Long Island, Payne’s boyhood home, is one of the landmarks of the island and is preserved with reverence and loving care. Foster wrote both words and music of nearly all his songs with a touch and instinct so sure and pro- found that they have been accepted as the model and inspiration for hundreds of other songs both as to words and music which have formed in large ~ measure our popular musical taste, but which like all imitations have found their way into oblivion. Which is the greater, the song—the words—or the soul of the song—the music? Payne was much incensed because an attempt was made to take the credit from him and give it to Bishop, who wrote the music of ““Home, Sweet Home,” or as some say, adapted it from an old Sicilian air. Credit has gen- erally been accorded to Payne because it was pointed out that the melody had been tried with other words and had not been a success. He wrote them and fitted them to the melody. There have been hun- dreds of thousands of popular and sentimental songs produced but fewer than a hundred have lived. We can have little patience with those who would refer to such songs as Payne’s and Foster’s as “simple little pieces making the elementary appeal,” and term them common-place and mediocre. All truly [ 30 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS great men and things are simple like Foster and his songs, and like them, deeply profound. When John Howard Payne fitted the words of “Home Sweet Home” to that old Sicilian air he struck the one chord within his own nature that was great; and he never struck it again. _ Such songs are like diamonds in a heap of gravel stones; they are not thereby to be considered gravel stones but still remain diamonds. And Stephen Foster’s diamonds will always shine out in the great wagon-load of popular songs that have long since been trampled under foot. The greatest writers, the Grimms, Anderson and other delvers into folk-lore, have not thought it beneath them to devote their lives merely to bringing to light the folk-lore and folk-songs of their native land; they sought for them as the diver for pearls. We have before us the life of a man who created the greatest of native songs in America, who left to us a glorious heritage of imper- ishable sentiment and melody—songs that are not even race songs, but are universal—who produced the purest gems with the instinct and ease of a mas- ter, while others even among the greatest in the field labored long in the production of a single master- piece. Critics have treated Foster much the same as Payne, Dan Emmett, who wrote “Dixie,” Thomas [31] WITHIN THREE CHORDS Dunn English, the author of “Ben Bolt,” and the composers of ““The Star Spangled Banner,” “Yankee Doodle,” “John Brown’s Body” and other songs which were the result of a single flash but which never came again. The melody for “John Brown’s Body” was taken from Foster's “Ellen Bayne.” Dan Emmett was an old minstrel, who knew nothing of musical composition, who was the son of a black- smith and never had more than an elementary edu- cation. He belonged to the school of Dan Rice, of “Jim Crow” fame, and in fact Emmett traveled with Rice and possibly received from him the suggestion ot the negro minstrel song. Foster owed much to such men as Dan Rice and Emmett, but his creative genius expressed in his refined and beautiful musical pictures have little in common with these artists, fascinating as they are. It has been the fortune of some men to achieve greatness and immortal fame by reason of the wide ranges of their faculties through all the realms of human experience; they have fascinated and cap- - tured the admiration of their fellow men by sheer variety in the glittering array of their talents which they have spread out before us. Stephen Foster was not one of these; his life was spent as a centripedal, not as a centrifugal force. “Wéithin three chords” [ 32 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS he compressed all the meaning that life held for him. His was no superficial knowledge of the true in- wardness and meaning of life; had it been, his songs would have gone the way of thousands of ephemeral and popular pieces modeled after his style, but with- out the essential Foster quality. When Rostand died it was said of him that al- though a great artist and poet, he lacked the one quality of poetic genius, without which he might not hope for immortality. ““Not many may touch the hidden source of ‘tears of things’ and posterity will not reckon Rostand among these,” said this critic. Foster had eminently the gift and faculty of communicating sympathy, both through his words and music, because what he wrote he actually lived. He lived and experienced and expressed himself within three chords so deeply that his own life- chord—the major one—snapped at the age of 37. His songs, written in the forties and fifties, “carry on” in their influence in the songs written down to the present day. In each realm in which he wrote, whether in plantation melodies, sentimental lyrics or even war songs, the trace of his hand is seen. And no man has been more greatly plagiarized and also neglected by those who have profited from him than has Foster. Some time ago in the Literary Digest [ 33 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS appeared an article, “Two Wars in Song,” compar- ing the songs of the Great war with those of the Civil war. I quote: te 6 Over There’ was surely the great song of this war, as ‘John Brown’s Body’ was of the other. George M. Cohan is entitled, not for the first time, to the credit of having his hand on the people’s pulse, of being a real interpreter of their moods. “The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, and we won't come back till it’s over, over there,’ and the gay but threatening melody epitomized the whole struggle from the American viewpoint. In the earlier song he struck the national note, as George F. Root struck it in the old war with his ‘Rally Round the Flag.’ Root, too, had his song of a single phase, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.’ We may call Cohan the Root of this war.” There are four songs mentioned in this paragraph. Two of them can be traced to Foster. The music — for “John Brown’s Body,” the great song of the Civil War, was taken from Foster’s “Ellen Bayne.” The other great Civil War song, “We are coming, Father Abraham,” belongs not to Root but to Foster. The quality of sympathy is not the only one that _makes Foster’s songs great; he has written pieces [ 34 ] WITHIN THREE CHORDS that live which are not characterized by the “gift of tears” and sympathy. It is related that when Herr Wilhelmj, the great violinist, reached New York in 1878, he went to a music store and asked if they had an arrangement of an American song which he though was called “Black Jack.” They did not know of any song by that title. Thereupon Herr Wilhelmj puckered up his lips and whistled a tune. “Ah!”, exclaimed the clerk, “he wants Old Black Joe.” His comment was, “If Americans know not this song, they are beasts.” In England, this song is sung today, but is know as “Poor Old Jeff.” The story is told of Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” that during the Civil war a northern regiment was so long delayed in being mustered out that most of the soldiers, in a state bordering on mutiny, broke through the sentry lines, made for a town near camp and at night returned in the condition of riotous inebriety when even the colonel was unable to con- trol them. The bandmaster called a few of his musicians together and in a few moments the strains of “Old Folks at Home” were heard above the shouts of the obstreperous soldiers. Within twenty minutes the half drunken crowd wept itself to sleep. [35 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS. OSTER did not originate negro minstrelsy, but his school of native songs and his own genius grew out of and were inspired by it. From it he learned the secret of approach to human sympathy through humor and drollery. Notwithstanding that he wrote many humorous pieces, there was little native humor in Foster; his natural creative mood was sensitive, refined and melancholy, not rollicking or humorous. But the open and free life about him, a period of Dutch, Irish, Yankee and negro singing, and above all his study of negro minstrelsy, from which his cultivated and finely attuned ear culled the few kernels of real melody, contributed the pop- ular element to a muse which, had it developed in another environment, would have appealed to a more limited circle of listeners. Foster watched the growth in popularity of negro minstrelsy with an eye to its possibilities for himself. And negro min- strelsy must be studied in connection with Foster because it contributed this great popular element to his songs. The birth and growth of negro minstrelsy in Cin- cinnati and the early west make also clear that the Cincinnati period was the fructifying time of his [ 36 | WITHIN THREE CHORDS genius. Foster’s native songs took the place and supplied the demand as nearly as possible in a coun- try settled as this one was, of the folk-songs of the older European countries. America was settled at the beginning by civilized people; what songs they had would necessarily have to be written ones. The European folk-songs were of course composed at a time when the common people did not read or write; so they had to be transmitted from one gen- eration to another by word of mouth. So true to nature and so perfect in their art and spontaneous in their expression of natural sentiment are Foster’s songs that critics have considered them as the near- est approach to the true folk-song that we have in America. Foster’s real life, like that of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he resembled in some respects, and with whose legible handwriting there is a quite remark- able resemblance, remains a closed book. If no one else in his time knew the enduring quality of his songs, Foster did himself. His pride and his unwillingness to be regarded as a player and singer show that he knew his own worth and that he was chagrined at not being appreciated as some- thing more than an amateur performer and a writer for the minstrel troupes. [ 37 J WITHIN THREE CHORDS His closest friends or his family perhaps knew very little of what was going on in his soul; as he left his boyhood behind him he lived almost alone with his own thoughts. His habitual air was one of brooding melancholy and abstraction; he seemed ever to be reaching out and searching into the hid- den depths of the world from which he alone knew how to bring into light and life and expression the beautiful and elusive things which he found there. While in Pittsburgh I tried to find whether there was some ground for the suggestion that Foster’s overpowering melancholy, which cast a permanent shadow over him, could have come from some tragic event in his life, unknown to his biographers. There was nothing of the kind so far as I could learn. It seems to have been simply constitutional and tem- peramental. Outwardly his life flowed unevent- fully; he was accorded a fair measure of apprecia- tion and material reward as a successful popular — song writer. Everything that is known of his life conduced to a normal and sane existence. Yet the mood for the sad and pathetic ever mastered him and he seemed unable to break from it. I was told that he would go out to the cemetery and weep passionate tears over a grave for his wife, although his wife was still living. The theory of a great [ 38 ] Weebl N “TOREE CHORDS tragedy in Foster’s life was entirely discounted and scouted by those who ought to have known if such existed. There are few now alive who can speak with any personal knowledge of Foster. “Billy” Hamilton, the man who should have written what he knew of him, died without writing what he had observed, though he was often urged to do so. His own wife perhaps knew little of him. She thought he was wasting his time and left him because of his habits. In New York he would write and compose a song in the morning, sell it in the afternoon and spend the proceeds before night. He had the heart of a child; except for his song writing he never seemed able to get beyond child- hood, to assume his natural responsibilities and to grapple with the world, although he had everything in his favor had he wished to take his place. In Pittsburgh, “his bronze statue stands just in- side the main gateway to Highland Park and the sculptor Moretti has represented him sitting with pencil and paper ready to jot down some immortal melody, while below and beside him Old Uncle Ned strums happily on his banjo.” In Cincinnati no place in local history is given to [ 39 } WITHIN THREE CHORDS him, the only record I have seen being his name and address in the city directory of 1849: “Foster, Stephen, bookkeeper for Irwin & Foster, boards Mrs. Griffin.” [ 40 } % ah GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE i 0100 iii ss wet Pig 2 "Gees San . ee n> Oe ‘ —