2. Here is a young Bing Crosby singing Old Folks at Home (Swanee River), in 1935, in a plantation setting, picking up an intro by a bunch of black children. Gorgeous song, but...well, hard on the modern eye.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xANozWnQEw …
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3. Foster was an amazingly gifted songwriter. Here, Ray Charles modernizes the same song, and makes it live.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v53KyS90mg0 …
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4. By the time of My Old Kentucky Home, circa 1853, Foster was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to turn his odes to Southern living to a more anti-slavery sound that sought sympathy with black Americans.
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5. Frederick Douglass said that My Old Kentucky Home awakened, "the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish." Here it is rendered by John Prine, who died of COVID-19 this springhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYQ4WnFG_0I …
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6. Beautiful Dreamer wasn't even published until 1864, after Foster's death. It's such a durable popular song: here's the Beatles doing a rock spin on it on the BBC in 1963https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHIf-GHjMm0 …
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7. Anyway, Foster's creative & moral arc, his groundbreaking commercial career, & his sad alcoholic demise are all both pieces of his American era & templates for the world of popular music ever since. His gifts were remarkable. He earned his place in the American songbook.
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That's the problem. No one liked Mozart.
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Is it a coincidence that Stephen Foster is one of the musicians Ewell wants to cancel?https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/at-the-university-of-north-texas-the-mob-comes-calling-for-a-music-theorist/ …
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Emmylou Harris, as always, helps a songwriter along to the next level:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zdXr3CnBGs …
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