The songwriter who made Swanee River famous barely set foot in the South
Stephen Foster wrote more than 200 songs, many steeped in Southern scenery, yet he never lived in the South and went there only once, on his honeymoon. He died in New York at 37 with 37 cents in Civil War scrip, three pennies and a scrap of lyric in his wallet.
Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, was his birthplace, and he arrived on July 4, 1826, the youngest boy after six brothers and three sisters. His mother remembered him marching about with a feather in his cap, beating a drum and whistling Auld Lang Syne. He taught himself clarinet, flute, guitar, piano and drums, and whistled much of what he later wrote. At 13 he came under Henry Kleber, a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh, and studied Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His first composition, the Tioga Waltz, arrived at 14. A stint at Jefferson College ended when he went off to Pittsburgh with a fellow student and never went back.
Marriage to Jane Denny McDowell in July 1850 opened his most productive stretch. Camptown Races and Nelly Bly came that year, Old Folks at Home in 1851, My Old Kentucky Home in 1853, and in 1854 Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, written for Jane. Many tunes were first performed in blackface minstrel shows, though he said he wanted to replace crude lyrics with words that would suit refined listeners, and after the early 1850s he turned mostly to parlour songs. His output also ranged from drinking songs to temperance pieces and church hymns.
His final four years in New York are thinly documented. In January 1864, weakened by fever, he was found injured in his Bowery hotel and died three days later in Bellevue Hospital; biographers still debate whether it was an accident. The wallet note reading Dear friends and gentle hearts later inspired a 1949 song, and Beautiful Dreamer was published after his death. His brother Morrison, the executor, may have destroyed papers he thought unflattering, which is partly why accounts of Foster's life vary so much.
The songs kept travelling. Kentucky adopted My Old Kentucky Home as its state song in 1928, and Florida made Old Folks at Home its own in 1935, later revising lyrics many found offensive. In 1957 Ray Charles turned it into Swanee River Rock, his first pop hit.
Source: Stephen Foster
