Stephen Collins Foster was born the ninth child of William Barclay Foster, a businessman and sometime politician, and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson. Though neither parent was musical, their daughters' education in voice and piano and Mrs Foster's subscriptions to literary magazines brought music and poetry into the home. The details of his life and career are sketchy. His first biography, an introduction to a collected edition of his songs, written by his brother Morrison (1896), offered impressions that have been repeated unquestioningly. As the keeper of the family papers, Morrison retained only selected correspondence and manuscripts, destroyed embarrassing items, and portrayed the songwriter as a naive genius, devoted to his parents, a dreamer and hopelessly inept at business. Emerson's more recent biography (1997) helps relate Foster to the other cultural figures and movements of his era in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and New York. From the age of five, Foster grew up in Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh's North Side), where he heard contrasting musical styles in Scots-Irish, German, Italian and American neighbourhoods and in public halls. He received a thorough education at private academies in Allegheny and at Athens and Towanda in northeastern Pennsylvania. He taught himself the flute (his principal instrument), clarinet, violin, piano and guitar sufficiently to perform socially. Although he did not study composition formally, he was helped by the German-born Henry Kleber (1816-1897), who from 1830 began a career as songwriter, music teacher, impresario, accompanist, conductor and music dealer in Pittsburgh. When he was 14 Foster composed the "Tioga Waltz"; his first published work was "Open thy lattice love" (1844), a barcarolle setting of a poem by George Pope Morris. Foster was attracted to the parlour ballads of Henry Russell and William Dempster, and to the songs and dances of the blackface minstrel shows. With a group of friends that included the writer Charles Shiras, who later collaborated with Foster on a musical play The Invisible Prince (performed 1853, now lost) and the song "Annie My Own Love" (1853), Foster first tried out his polka-songs "Lou'siana Belle" and "Susanna" (Oh! Susanna) and the dirge "Uncle Ned" (Old Uncle Ned). Like his brothers, Foster was expected to find work in industry, and served from late 1846 to 1849 as a bookkeeper for his brother Dunning's steamship company in Cincinnati. His main interest was music, however, and he offered his minstrel songs in manuscript copies to professional performers and the ballads and piano dances to young ladies, making presents of neatly inked scores. "Susanna" became an instant hit, even before he offered it to the publisher W.C. Peters in Cincinnati for a token payment. As the 'marching song of the '49ers' in the California Gold Rush and the unofficial theme song of the wagon trains of the westward expansion, the song became known by members of all levels of society and all ethnic and racial groups, its melody and words - "I come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee" - becoming enduring as icons of Americana. Largely on the unprecedented popularity of the minstrel songs, he signed a contract with the New York publishers Firth, Pond & Co. in 1849, then in 1850 returned to Pittsburgh and married Jane Denny McDowell. From 1851 until his death, initially to the disapproval of his family, he wrote songs professionally, becoming the first person in the United States to earn his living solely through the sale of compositions to the public. In February 1852 he took his only trip to the South, a delayed honeymoon with Jane on a steamboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. In 1853 he wrote a new contract with Firth, Pond & Co., and in January 1854 produced The Social Orchestra, a collection of 73 of his own and other composers' melodies arranged as instrumental solos, duets, trios and quartets to accompany quadrilles and other social dancing. In the same year he ceased writing minstrel melodies and began arranging his most popular songs for guitar accompaniment, focusing his efforts on parlour ballads such as "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" and "Hard Times Come Again No More" (1854), the unaccompanied quartet "Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming", the comedic "Some Folks", his only temperance song "Comrades Fill No Glass for Me" (all 1855) and "Gentle Annie" (1856). In 1853-4 Stephen and Jane were separated, Shiras died in 1854, and in the following year Foster lost both parents and all but ceased writing music. He produced one published song each in 1856 and 1857; with debts mounting, in 1857 he sold the future rights to his previous work back to his publishers Firth, Pond & Co. and F.D. Benteen. He wrote a new contract with Firth, Pond & Co. in 1858, although still not producing songs, and was soon overdrawn. In 1860 he moved to New York to be near the publishers and theatres, and returned briefly to minstrelsy with "The Glendy Burk". The same year "Old Black Joe" (Poor Old Joe) appeared, a synthesis of his ideals for stage and parlour ballads. His wife and daughter returned to Pennsylvania, and his remaining three years were his most productive if least inspired, with 98 titles including 27 Sunday School hymns. He collaborated with the lyricist George Cooper on music hall songs such as "If You've Only Got a Moustache" and the comic duet "Mr. & Mrs. Brown" (issued posthumously in 1864). His one enduringly memorable song from this period is the serenade "Beautiful Dreamer", written in 1862 but published after his death. Foster's difficulty in earning a living was due in part to a lack of legal recourse with publishers and the absence of performing or mechanical rights; he frequently borrowed against future earnings and accrued unpayable debts. During the Civil War his health declined and he resorted to alcohol. Weakened by a fever and an untreated burn from an overturned lamp, on 10 January 1864 he collapsed in his New York hotel room, struck a wash basin and gashed his head: he died three days later at Bellevue Hospital. After a funeral at Trinity Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh where his birth and marriage had been registered, he was buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville.
From the description of Foster Hall Collection, 1800-1952. (University of Pittsburgh). WorldCat record id: 768428960
