page_title: Stephen Foster
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Stephen Foster / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: ONLY HOUSE STILL STANDING IN WHICH STEPHEN FOSTER IS KNOWN TO HAVE LIVED. HERE IN 1854 HE COMPOSED AND PUBLISHED “JEANNIE WITH THE LIGHT BROWN HAIR”
context_page_description: Stephen Collins Foster, known as "the father of American music", was an American songwriter known primarily for his parlor and minstrel music. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna", "Hard Times Come Again No More", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "Old Black Joe", and "Beautiful Dreamer", and many of his compositions remain popular today. He has been identified as "the most famous songwriter of the nineteenth century" and may be the most recognizable American composer in other countries. Most of his handwritten music manuscripts are lost, but editions issued by publishers of his day feature in various collections.
context_section_description: In 1846, Foster moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and became a bookkeeper with his brother Dunning's steamship company. He wrote his first successful songs in 1848–1849, among them "Oh! Susanna", which became an anthem of the California Gold Rush. In 1849, he published Foster's Ethiopian Melodies, which included the successful song "Nelly Was a Lady" as made famous by the Christy Minstrels. A plaque marks the site of his residence in Cincinnati, where the Guilford School building is now located.
  Then he returned to Pennsylvania and signed a contract with the Christy Minstrels. It was during this period that he wrote most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Ring de Banjo" (1851), "Old Folks at Home" (known also as "Swanee River", 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane Denny McDowell.
  Many of Foster's songs were of the blackface minstrel show tradition popular at the time but now taboo due to racial prejudice. He sought to "build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order". In the 1850s, he associated with a Pittsburgh-area abolitionist leader named Charles Shiras, and wrote an abolitionist play himself. Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon.
  Foster's last four years were spent in New York City. There is little information on this period of his life, although family correspondence has been preserved.
caption: House in Hoboken, New Jersey where Foster is believed to have written "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" in 1854[13]
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