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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Stephen Foster ? American Songwriter
Stephen Foster ? American Songwriter
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Stephen Foster, American Songwriter
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Before radio and television, movies and recordings, entertainment was often a family or community matter.
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Someone in the family could play a musical instrument or neighborhood musician would play for small gatherings.
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In addition, there would be traveling groups of musicians, actors, and clowns who would go from town to town.
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In 19th century United States, one of the most popular forms of entertainment was the Minstrel show.
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Black slavery was still permitted in the southern states until 1865.
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Even after that date, the lives of many blacks working on large farms or plantations did not change much.
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They did hard physical labor in the fields, had little control over their lives, and very little time to relax with their friends.
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Foster, who was born in 1826, made this situation the background for many of his songs.
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White musicians would try to imagine the feelings of black men and women working on the plantations.
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They would write songs in the dialect or speech patterns that they thought black slaves used.
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In these songs, the black people would be talking about their hardships, falling in love, playing music and dancing, and finally growing old and dying.
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White performers would blacken their faces and sing these songs to white audiences.
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They would play musical instruments like the banjo, a small 4 string guitar which black people played often as a small boy.
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Stephen Foster had sometimes been taken to a black church by his family's black servant, Olivia Pyes.
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Here he first heard the melodies that inspired his own songs.
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Only a couple of Foster's songs are based directly on ***** spirituals, but many of his songs have the natural simplicity and emotional power of folk songs.
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The youngest member of a large family, Foster showed his musical talent at an early age.
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He played the flute, violin and piano.
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Growing up in an energetic business family, Steven was expected to become a businessman, and for a while he worked as a bookkeeper.
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All his spare time, however, was spent writing songs.
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Foster attended minstrel shows and tried to get the performers to sing his songs.
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Sometimes the performers would steal his songs and publish them under their own names.
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Copyright laws were weak and rarely enforced, so some music publishers would just go ahead and publish a song without paying the songwriter.
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Since Foster hoped to make a living as a songwriter, this was a problem.
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Foster's first hit song was oh Susanna, published in 1848.
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It became popular with the thousands of men from all over the United States who were heading West to the California Gold Rush of 1849.
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Unfortunately, as an unknown songwriter, Foster received no money from his early songs.
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He seems to have given them outright to the music publishers just to establish his reputation.
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Foster's name, however, was soon widely known, and in 1849 he was able to afford to give up bookkeeping and marry the daughter of a Pittsburgh physician.
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During the next five years, he earned A moderately good income from songwriting.
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In 1851, a daughter, Marion, was born.
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Foster wrote many of his best known songs at this time, Old Folks at Home in 1851, My Old Kentucky Home in 1853, and Genie with a light brown hair in 1854.
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Difficulties in Foster's marriage began fairly soon.
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These may have been partly due to his strange work habits.
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He spent days locked in his room working on his songs.
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Then he would rush out with his materials to the local music store, presumably to test out the songs on his friends.
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He also became more and more addicted to alcohol.
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Eventually, his wife and daughter left him.
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Foster died alone in a rooming house in 1864.
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Immigrants to the United States brought their traditional folk songs with them.
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However, there are very few typically American songs.
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Foster provided many songs that expressed the life of 19th century USA.
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His songs were easy to sing and were popular with nearly everyone.
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In a sense, Foster helped to create roots for American popular music.