Stephen Foster

Stephen Collins Foster showed remarkable talent from his earliest childhood, and the young child displayed a precocious musical ability. Stephen grew up in a large, lively, musical family and his talents developed largely by instinct and under the influence of his sisters. At age two, he plucked out tunes on his sister Ann Eliza's guitar, which he called his little piano. As a young boy Stephen evinced more interest in music than in other academic subjects. But, as the child of a middle-class family in an era before tax-supported public education, he received privately tutors, then schooling at private academies in Pittsburgh and in north-central Pennsylvania. He expressed distaste for rote learning and recitation, but an avid reader, he eventually became a literate, well-educated person by the standards of the day. Foster was musically literate as well, probably receiving some formal musical training from a German immigrant, Henry Kleber, an accomplished and versatile musician who eventually exerted a major influence on Pittsburgh's musical life as a performer, composer, music merchant, impresario, and teacher. Stephen learned to play a full-size piano and exhibited his greatest instrumental talent on the flute. By age ten, he began performing popular comic songs with a group of local boys. As a teen, Foster enjoyed the friendship of young men and women from some of Pittsburgh's most prosperous and respectable families, with whom he sang and wrote some of his earliest serious songs. Blackface of the 19th century, called “Ethiopian songs” by Foster, compares well to rock and roll of the modern era, each known for being rowdy, raunchy and raw. Unlike the parlor songs of genteel society, blackface represented something primitive and taboo. Sung in coarse black dialect, overtly racist, they often dehumanized the African Americans whom served as the inspiration for the genre. Inspired more by the style of the music than the meaning of its message, Foster wrote a seemingly innocuous blackface ditty in his twenty-first year that launched his career.