For my brother, Bryan Lightweis (1977–2024) Comrade, fill no glass for me You might as well cancel the songwriter’s century. Nothing short of that could eliminate his hooks and rhythms, the vocables and caesurae and scansion that have, in each of his songs, a performance history of their own. Born in the American provinces, he traveled the sonic planet, pillaging traditions to build his own oeuvre. He wrote about places he had never or not yet seen — names on the map and nameless sites, too. The music dances with or without the motion of your body in space: you hear in his songs a certain strut, a spin, a pivot on the heel. Women’s names in his lyrics feel like wanted posters: the beginning of a love story or a missing person’s report. Sometimes, I wonder at his raw feeling; sometimes, at the purity of his commercial ambitions. No one was ever so tender or so grasping: a songwriter and a widget-maker all at once. He lived in the terrarium of his music; he seemed to ablate his identity, erase his own face. Some necessary shifts in the culture have nonetheless rendered his music dangerous: bad in the old and older senses. He stole something profound from the most powerless people in his world, and so we are left to contemplate reparative action in our own time, even at significant cost to his legacy. But any cost, any reduction in his status, rattles the foundation of vernacular music and — if it doesn’t sound too alarmist — the nation itself. How will they hum? How will they whistle? How will they sing? Perhaps a scalpel could remove those sounds from the American brain, but we would be left with his inheritors — which is to say, everyone. Who, you might ask, is this artist who has defined America? No, not Michael Jackson. It is Stephen Collins Foster, the nation’s first professional songwriter. Think about their characters, all assembled in the singular and strange American canon: Susie and Susanna, Diana and Jeannie, Billie Jean and Nelly Bly. Think, too, of the troubles they travel with in contemporary America. One doesn’t want to linger on the subjects of “Pretty Young Thing” (1982), “Thriller” (1985), or “Smooth Criminal” (1987), which now seem like signed confessions of Jackson’s pedophilia. Foster’s danger, of course, feels more foundational to the composition of his music than Jackson’s not-so-secret life: blackface minstrelsy is more often the text than the subtext of his work. But it is nonetheless true that these two songwriters created our soundscape. Myths circle Foster, who had the fortune — good or bad, depending upon your perspective — of life before MTV. Among those myths, there is a post-hoc conversion narrative that claimed he moved from the blackface stage to the domestic parlor with the conscious composition of more genteel music, that he redeemed the minstrel’s lampoon in “Oh Susanna!” (1848) with tender songs like “Nelly Was a Lady” (1849). Both songs pry apart a man and woman, but the latter ends with a widower’s lament — “toll the bell for lovely Nell / my dark Virginny bride” — that refuses the flattening language of the minstrel stage. The conversion narrative, however, is belied by any complete chronology of Foster’s career. The historian Emily Bingham demonstrates that he likely turned to — rather than from — the blackface stage in order to support his young family. Foster wanted to “build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people,” as he wrote to the showman E. P. Christy in 1852, “by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.” This is no conversion: Foster sanitized the minstrel song for the family piano, rather than wholly leaving the genre behind. Another famous songwriter, John Newton, is said to have given himself to God during a turbulent voyage in the Atlantic Ocean. He wrote “Amazing Grace” in 1748 and quit the ignoble profession of slave-trading after only seven more years of feathering his nest. Whatever pangs of conscience Foster felt, he similarly answered in the Augustinian tradition of saying “not yet.” He wrote plantation songs until 1864, when he drank himself to death on the Bowery in New York. His body was found with a potential first line — “Dear friends and gentle hearts” — scrawled onto a torn piece of paper and tucked into his pocket. He might have died of drink, or more efficiently taken his own life with a knife. Accounts vary. Much of Foster’s myth was devised by his brother Morrison. An able promoter, he saw some advantage in inscribing Stephen’s birth on July 4, 1826, within a few hours of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson’s eerily proximate deaths. We approach Foster’s bicentennial — as marked in calls for academic papers and special journal issues and smaller-scale events near his Pittsburgh birthplace and spiritual home along the Ohio River — but we are unlikely to see his life memorialized in proportion to his influence. A few interested parties might turn to his music — from Paul Robeson’s stentorian “Swanee River” (1930) to the Byrds’ proto-psychedelic “Oh Susanna!” (1965) — with the blinds drawn and the volume low. In the opening scene of Blazing Saddles, written by Mel Brooks with Andrew Bergman and Richard Pryor, a white foreman demands a “good old work song” like “Camptown Races” — a Foster song from 1850 — from an all-black railroad crew. Instead Bart suavely sings “I Get a Kick Out of You” with that urbane indifference to racial aggression that characterizes every sublime second of Cleavon Little’s time on screen. But as soon as he is out of the line of sight of the white cowboys, Bart dances a modified chicken wing on a pump trolley. He sings Foster’s doo dah doo dah while he dances, though he claimed to prefer Cole Porter. I may try the same ruse.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence