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In Search of Stephen Foster
| Article
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19240 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
2,954 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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The small worn leather billfold fits neatly into the palm of my hand. Inside are three fragile pieces of Civil War paper currency, three pennies, and a tiny slip of paper on which is penciled in a fading, spidery script: "Dear friends and gentle hearts."
The office of the Stephen Foster Memorial glows in the late afternoon sun. Stephen Root, the memorial's curator, is showing me the items found on Stephen Collins Foster after his fatal collapse in a Bowery lodging house.
"The purse came from Foster's coat pocket," Root is explaining as I spread the items on a table. "This was all he had--thirty-eight cents and a piece of paper. Perhaps the words are the title to a song. He had written other songs with those words, but not in that combination. We know that he went around jotting down ideas for songs on whatever he had available, even his thumbnail. So he may have stuck this paper in his wallet intending to write a song the next chance he got."
It never came. Ill with a fever, confined to a small, sparely furnished hotel room in New York's Bowery district, Foster fell, struck his head, and was bleeding profusely when help came. He lingered for three days before he died in Bellevue Hospital on January 13, 1864. Examination of the hospital register is revealing: Foster's name is misspelled; his birth date incorrectly listed; and the cause of death, "Disease--Injuries accidentally received," vague.
Errors, half-truths, and outright falsifications have persisted ever since. "All some people who visit the memorial here in Pittsburgh know about Stephen Foster is what they've seen in the movie Swanee River [1939] starring Don Ameche," says Root. "The people at 20th Century-Fox came here to research the picture, then threw everything out and rewrote his life! The real Foster was a man, not a drunken bum in the gutter--which is essentially the way he ends up in the film. He was a well-educated composer and very professional about his career. He was not a sloppy businessman. He knew what he was doing. The truth about Foster is more fascinating than the Hollywood version.
"Actually, Foster worked very hard those last few years in New York," says Root. "But he was a pioneer in a profession--songwriting--that didn't really exist yet. There was little to support him. He didn't have a publishing firm behind him, and he was trying to beat the streets from one publisher to another to sell his songs outright. It would have been much better if he
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