Stephen Foster

From Philosopedia

Stephen Foster (4 July 1826 - 13 January 1864)

According to Dan Barker, Foster was one of many major musicians who were freethinkers - he cites information found in Ken Emerson's Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (Da Capo Press, 1998):

Stephen Foster wrote the first great American popular songs. He was the first American songwriter to support himself from music sales, propelling the industry in its infancy. From the 1848 “Oh, Susanna,” his first hit, through “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (“Way down upon the Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” and many others, Foster produced a body of songs that have been remembered and sung longer than the works of any other American songwriters.

Irving Berlin honored Foster by quoting part of the “Swanee River” in his first hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (he had a picture of Foster on his office wall). George Gershwin paid him a similar tribute with his first hit song “Swanee.” They knew that if you wanted to tap into the culture of America, you had to start with Stephen Foster.

Little is known of Stephen Foster’s inner religious views, but he lived and worked as if he were not a believer. He was a nonconformist, never joined a church and rarely attended services. None of his music can be said to be inspired by religious faith. The songs that he chose to write by his own volition were purely secular.

Toward the end of his life, when he was poor and hungry (he had sold his songs too early, before the age of royalty contracts), he was forced to find work where he could. He accepted an assignment writing Sunday School songs. “As his life hit rock bottom,” biographer Ken Emerson writes, “Foster, who never expressed much interest in religion, who had resisted the urgings of his sisters Ann Eliza and Henrietta to join the church, wrote nearly thirty songs for Sunday Schools. He hadn’t found God, but he had found a publisher.” Those songs, which went into the Sabbath School Bell No. 2, were part of an endeavor to indoctrinate children with “catchy” music, sometimes setting religious words to secular melodies. “Sorrows Shall Come No More” is a rewrite of Foster’s secular “Hard Times Come Again No More.” “We Love The Happy School” was set to Foster’s tune “Some Folks.” (The fact that the lyrics were changed shows that the original songs were unsuitable for religious purposes.)

Perhaps the original lyrics to “Some Folks” (1855) give a glimpse into Stephen Foster’s liberal attitude of live-and-let-live as well as his celebration of “life before death.” Some of the words appear to be a rebuke to Puritanism:

Some folks like to sigh,

Some folks do; Some folks do.

Some folks long to die,

But that’s not me nor you.

Some folks fret and scold,

Some folks do; Some folks do;

They’ll soon be dead and cold,

But that’s not me nor you.

Long live the merry, merry heart

That laughs by night and day,

Like the Queen of Mirth,

No matter what some folks say.

The lyrics for his 1846 utopian song, “There’s a Good Time Coming,” do not point to an afterlife or theocracy. They yearn rather for a time of tolerance, when religious divisiveness shall be eliminated:

Shameful rivalries of creed

Shall not make the martyr bleed,

In the good time coming.

Religion shall be shorn of pride,

And flourish all the stronger;

And Charity shall trim her lamp;

Wait a little longer.

He may not have gone on record secifically as being an agnostic or atheist, but he wrote like a non-believer and freethinker, one whose focus was on music and happiness.