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The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster - A Revealing Portrait of the Forgotten Man Behind "Swanee River," "Beautiful Dreamer," and "My Old Kentucky Home" (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,893
Discovery Miles 18 930
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The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster - A Revealing Portrait of the Forgotten Man Behind "Swanee River," "Beautiful Dreamer," and "My Old Kentucky Home" (Hardcover)
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The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging
reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood
father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster's
plantation songs, like "Old Folks at Home" and "My Old Kentucky
Home," fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due
to their controversial lyrics. Foster embraced the minstrel
tradition for a brief time, refining it and infusing his songs with
sympathy for slaves, before abandoning the genre for respectable
parlor music. The youngest child in a large family, he grew up in
the shadows of a successful older brother and his president
brother-in-law, James Buchanan, and walked a fine line between the
family's conservative politics and his own pro-Lincoln sentiments.
Foster lived most of his life just outside of industrial,
smoke-filled Pittsburgh and wrote songs set in a pastoral
South-unsullied by the grime of industry but tarnished by the
injustice of slavery. Rather than defining Foster by his
now-controversial minstrel songs, JoAnne O'Connell reveals a
prolific composer who concealed his true feelings in his lyrics and
wrote in diverse styles to satisfy the changing tastes of his
generation. In a trenchant reevaluation of his NewYork Bowery
years, O'Connell illustrates how Foster purposely abandoned the
style for which he was famous to write lighthearted songs for newly
popular variety stages and music halls. In the last years of his
life, Foster's new direction in songwriting stood in the vanguard
of vaudeville and musical comedy to pave the way for the future of
American popular music. His stylistic flexibility in the face of
evolving audience preferences not only proves his versatility as a
composer but also reveals important changes in the American music
and publishing industries. An intimate biography of a complex,
controversial, and now neglected composer, The Life and Songs of
Stephen Foster is an important story about the father of American
music. This invaluable portrait of the political, economic, social,
racial, and gender issues of antebellum and Civil War America will
appeal to history and music lovers of all generations.
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