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Authors: Peter Quinn
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way she sat, with her hands folded on her lap. Olivia sat that way when she put him to bed at night. Her lovely face in the candlelight, the soft pitch of her voice as she sang him to sleep. He was four when his father brought her home, a colored girl of twelve to help his mother. Amid the tedious decline from respectability that his fatherâs drinking inflicted on the family, amid the stifling respectability of their house in Pittsburgh, she was like a purple flower, luxuriant and exotic, wildly out of place, as if an orchid from Africa had been placed in the window of their austere, wood-framed house, its white curtains always stiff and starched and disapproving.
She chased him throughthe high grass by the river, her laughter a kind of music. On Sunday afternoons, without his parentsâ knowledge, she took him to the Negro church. He watched through the rear door. The people swayed and danced. He had never heard the human voice make such sounds. She never talked about her past, and he never thought to ask. When he grew older and went to school, her chores became cooking and cleaning. She slept in the shed behind the house, in a tiny room above the cow stall. He sold his first song for three dollars and gave her one. On the day he left to work in Cincinnati, his parents stood straight and formal on the porch. Oh, how Olivia cried and carried on.
Oh, donât you cry for me.
Dear Olivia. A long time since anyone had cried for Stephen Foster.
Suicide? Was there a convexity for that? He felt around his head. You had to think about it, alone in a hotel attic when the wind rattled the window, a continuous noise: the point in the night when the knowledge struck you suddenly, as if for the first time, that youâd sold the rights and royalties to most of a lifeâs work for $1,800, all of it long gone. You had to regard the instantaneous solution offered by the symmetry of the razor across the windpipe, a neat line.
The line between a songwriter and a hack? Where was it? Or, to be more honest, where had it been? Foster pulled his legs back from the fire. The ragged threads on the cuffs of his pants were singed and smoldering. He held his hands close to the low, intense flame of the coals, which had a heavy layer of ash on top of them, holding down the heat. He picked up his pad from beside the chair. The pages were wrinkled from the heat. He fanned the coals with the pad till the ashes rose up the chimney and the flames jumped. He threw the pad onto the fire and it turned black, smoking, crumpling, consuming itself in a hum of combustion.
Ten-line musical verse in which nine lines are identical. Simple harmony. Simple melody. Music in three chords. Music that set people singing, that for all its clichés was new, music to work by, to travel by, to pan for gold by, to load a gun by, to run a machine by, to go to war by, music for the people, and if not
of
the people, then atleast an echo in their heads of some older tradition they no longer had time to cultivate, new music for a new way of life, a new industry for an America of cities and railroads, America in a hurry, with Stephen Foster stoking the engine of progress.
For âOld Folks at Home,â Firth, Pond & Co. had kept two presses running all day, but even that hadnât been enough. They had to add a third, then a fourth. Up till that point, three thousand copies of an instrumental piece and five thousand of a song had been considered a great sale. âOld Folksâ hit ten thousand in a month.
Gwine to run all day.
It raced ahead of âOh! Susanna!â for which heâd received a flat payment of one hundred dollars. âCamptown Racesâ had sold more than five thousand copies at two cents a copy, and earned him just over one hundred dollars.
I keeps my money in an old tow bag.
The publishers were staggered by the success of âOld Folks.â Desperate for money at the time, he sold the title space to E. P. Christy for
She chased him throughthe high grass by the river, her laughter a kind of music. On Sunday afternoons, without his parentsâ knowledge, she took him to the Negro church. He watched through the rear door. The people swayed and danced. He had never heard the human voice make such sounds. She never talked about her past, and he never thought to ask. When he grew older and went to school, her chores became cooking and cleaning. She slept in the shed behind the house, in a tiny room above the cow stall. He sold his first song for three dollars and gave her one. On the day he left to work in Cincinnati, his parents stood straight and formal on the porch. Oh, how Olivia cried and carried on.
Oh, donât you cry for me.
Dear Olivia. A long time since anyone had cried for Stephen Foster.
Suicide? Was there a convexity for that? He felt around his head. You had to think about it, alone in a hotel attic when the wind rattled the window, a continuous noise: the point in the night when the knowledge struck you suddenly, as if for the first time, that youâd sold the rights and royalties to most of a lifeâs work for $1,800, all of it long gone. You had to regard the instantaneous solution offered by the symmetry of the razor across the windpipe, a neat line.
The line between a songwriter and a hack? Where was it? Or, to be more honest, where had it been? Foster pulled his legs back from the fire. The ragged threads on the cuffs of his pants were singed and smoldering. He held his hands close to the low, intense flame of the coals, which had a heavy layer of ash on top of them, holding down the heat. He picked up his pad from beside the chair. The pages were wrinkled from the heat. He fanned the coals with the pad till the ashes rose up the chimney and the flames jumped. He threw the pad onto the fire and it turned black, smoking, crumpling, consuming itself in a hum of combustion.
Ten-line musical verse in which nine lines are identical. Simple harmony. Simple melody. Music in three chords. Music that set people singing, that for all its clichés was new, music to work by, to travel by, to pan for gold by, to load a gun by, to run a machine by, to go to war by, music for the people, and if not
of
the people, then atleast an echo in their heads of some older tradition they no longer had time to cultivate, new music for a new way of life, a new industry for an America of cities and railroads, America in a hurry, with Stephen Foster stoking the engine of progress.
For âOld Folks at Home,â Firth, Pond & Co. had kept two presses running all day, but even that hadnât been enough. They had to add a third, then a fourth. Up till that point, three thousand copies of an instrumental piece and five thousand of a song had been considered a great sale. âOld Folksâ hit ten thousand in a month.
Gwine to run all day.
It raced ahead of âOh! Susanna!â for which heâd received a flat payment of one hundred dollars. âCamptown Racesâ had sold more than five thousand copies at two cents a copy, and earned him just over one hundred dollars.
I keeps my money in an old tow bag.
The publishers were staggered by the success of âOld Folks.â Desperate for money at the time, he sold the title space to E. P. Christy for
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