Here’s why we don’t celebrate Stephen Foster Day anymore
In 1951, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee recommended that President Harry A. Truman designate Jan. 13 as Stephen Foster Day. The Lawrenceville native born on the Fourth of July was recognized as “the father of American folk music” and “a national expression of democracy through his clear and simple embodiment of American tradition.”
It seemed like a good idea. Generations of musicians, historians and public figures had linked the composer, born in 1826, to the nation’s fundamental ideals and history of progress. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer” and “My Old Kentucky Home” were so much a part of the American canon that people all over the country sang them on Jan. 13, the day Foster died in 1864.
So what happened to Stephen Foster Day?
In the 1950s, Foster’s music became a flashpoint as civil rights activists focused on his lyrics with offensive language. Songs such as “Old Black Joe,” about a freed Black man reminiscing his younger days, were banned from broadcasts nationwide.
In his hometown, there was a growing chorus of criticism aimed at Foster’s statue in Oakland, which depicted a barefoot banjoplaying Black man at the composer’s feet. In April 2018, the statue that had stood for 118 years was removed, and Foster Day celebrations continued to dwindle amid growing public skepticism.
After decades of research, many historians have come to see the 19th-century songwriter’s unprecedented rise to prominence as resulting from a combination of melodic skill and lucky timing. Foster hit the scene just as the music-publishing and instrument-making industries were maturing. It would have been impossible for earlier composers to have their music printed in such large numbers, disseminated so quickly and performed in so many homes across the country.
Consider, too, the politics of his day, which resulted in the emancipation of millions of enslaved people and the establishment of the federal government as the protector of citizens’ rights. To be sure, Foster’s songs were closely associated with a changing America.
Although he is often linked to Civil War-era reforms, Foster vehemently disagreed with them. In campaign songs for conservative Democrats, he favored states’ rights and minimal federal power. Such views were aligned with calls to bolster the institution of slavery and extend it into new American territories in the West.
Early in the Civil War, Foster supported quashing the rebellion to preserve the union, but his only wartime song to mention enslavement, “A Soldier in the Colored Brigade,” expresses a desire to maintain slavery. The lyrics were written by his close friend, George Cooper, who later reminisced that “Foster disliked the war as, to my mind, he scorned to see the disruption of the ties that held the negroes to their masters & of which he had written so many songs.”
Historians have long studied how some of Foster’s songs were inserted into theatrical adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” These songs appealed to anti-slavery activists because they portray enslaved people with a full range of human emotions, a rarity
in those days. In “Old Folks at Home,” for example, a freed man expresses love and nostalgia for his younger days, when he was surrounded by loved ones.
Yet this song and “Old Black Joe” also play into the “happy slave” stereotype that pro-slavery activists deployed to portray enslavement as benevolent. The song was embraced by the pro-slavery movement at the same time anti-slavery activists were singing it.
As a Democrat who was ambivalent enough about slavery to leave it up to the states, Foster wrote ambiguous songs that appealed to sheet-music consumers across the political spectrum. This ambiguity enabled the composer to come to be seen as a symbol of American democracy. By the end of the 19th century, many Americans chose only to see in his songs the nation’s history of progress.
In Pittsburgh, the statue of Foster was erected in 1900 amid fanfare. The Pittsburg Press wrote that he “did as much if not more toward freeing of the southern negro from the bonds of slavery than Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.” This remarkable distortion made fora powerful myth that catapulted future commemorations, including Foster Day, into the 21st century.
Between 1916 and 1925, Pittsburgh banks sponsored concerts that mixed Foster’s compositions with patriotic, folk and popular songs in public sing-alongs. When the city of Pittsburgh began to manage the concerts in 1923, officials encouraged the Civic Club of Allegheny County to organize a nationwide observance. In 1927, the events were taken over by the Tuesday Musical Club.
Foster’s descendants were guests of honor at the activities, which drew large audiences early on. Orchestras played Foster’s music, church bells rang his songs,
and radio stations aired Foster programs. Elaborate concerts were held at Carnegie Music Hall and, years later, at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. At Foster’s graveside in Allegheny Cemetery, clergy, representatives from public schools, University of Pittsburgh professors and members of the Civic Club gave speeches. An annually chosen dignitary placed a laurel wreath on Foster’s grave.
The Tuesday Musical Club turned over management of the programs to Pitt in 1946. Despite Truman’s Foster Day proclamation, the commemorations shrank each year. Pittsburgh’s celebrations were reduced to a service and performance at Downtown’s Trinity Cathedral on Sixth Avenue, the site of Foster’s funeral, followed by a graveside memorial. By the early 1980s, the ceremonies had been taken over by the Allegheny Cemetery Association, and in the 1990s all that remained was a single event in the cemetery’s Temple of Memories Mausoleum, where Foster is depicted in stained glass.
In2018, Pittsburgh officials decided to remove the Foster statue from public view. Installed in Highland Park in 1900, it was moved to Oakland in the 1940s. It currently
resides in an outdoor storage area in Highland Park. But it is slated to become part of a 2023 exhibit of decommissioned Confederate statues alongside modern art. The show, tentatively titled “MONUMENTS,” is to be in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, according to The Architect’s Newspaper.
The exhibition’s curators are aware that Foster was not a Confederate sympathizer, but they want to include the statue to reflect how its depiction of a “happy slave” and Foster’s music contributed to pro-Confederate myths after theCivil War.
For the time being, formal Stephen Foster Day celebrations have ceased, marking the culmination of a decadeslong trend of Americans growing increasingly uneasy with public commemorations of the Pittsburghborn composer.
Kathryn Miller Haines and Christopher Lynch are colleagues at the Center for American Music in the University of Pittsburgh Library System, where they introduce students and researchers to the Foster Hall Collection, the principal archive of Stephen Foster’s life and music. Opinions expressed in this article are their own.