The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster PDF Author: JoAnne O'Connell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442253878
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
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.

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster PDF Author: JoAnne O'Connell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442253878
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Life and Times of Stephen Foster

The Life and Times of Stephen Foster PDF Author: Susan Zannos
Publisher: Mitchell Lane
ISBN: 1545749000
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
A biography of the nineteenth-century American composer.

Doo-dah!

Doo-dah! PDF Author: Ken Emerson
Publisher: Wayland
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In the first biography of Foster in more than sixty years, Ken Emerson makes the man as well as his music come alive.

Stephen Foster Song Book

Stephen Foster Song Book PDF Author: Stephen Collins Foster
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486230481
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Old favorites such as Beautiful Dreamer and Oh! Susanna as well as patriotic, plantation, and minstrel songs by the American composer are presented along with reproductions of original covers

Walking Ollie

Walking Ollie PDF Author: Stephen Foster
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440639248
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Britain's answer to Marley and Me-the hilarious and heartwarming international bestseller about learning to live with a troublesome dog. Like many first-time pet owners, London-based novelist Stephen Foster was upbeat as he began his search for a puppy to adopt. How hard can it be to take care of a dog, he thought-read a guidebook or two, buy a few supplies, and get on with it. But all the books and supplies in the world couldn't have prepared him for life with Ollie, a willful and moody adopted dog who quickly demonstrated his displeasure at the notion of being told what to do. Walking Ollie tells the funny and charming story of how a growling, skittish man and his equally growling, skittish dog broke each other in, came to see eye to eye, and decided to become best friends.

Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster

Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster PDF Author: Stephen Collins Foster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hymns, English
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description


"Susanna," "Jeanie," and "the Old Folks at Home"

Author: William W. Austin
Publisher: New York : Macmillan Publishing Company ; London: Collier Macmillan
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description


The Brotherhood of Thieves

The Brotherhood of Thieves PDF Author: Stephen Symonds Foster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Slavery
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description


Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins PDF Author: Nicholas Martin
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250115965
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This is the true story of Florence Foster Jenkins—now the basis of a major motion picture starring Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep! She was a woman with a dream. Nobody believed in her talent. But nothing could stop her. . . She had no pitch, no rhythm, and no tone. Still, Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) became one of America’s best-known sopranos. Born in 1868, Florence was a talented young pianist whose wealthy father refused to let her continue her musical studies in Europe. In retaliation, Florence eloped with Dr. Frank Jenkins, a man twice her age, and moved to New York. But when her father died and left her a large sum of money, Florence finally had a chance to pursue her one true passion: Singing. But first she would have to learn how to become a great singer. Years of lessons and a chance meeting with St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), who would become her manager and common-law husband, would help launch Florence’s career and entry into New York’s prestigious classical musical societies, culminating in her giving a recital, at the age of seventy-six, at Carnegie Hall. This is story of a woman who was not afraid to recreate herself into the person she wished to become—and achieve her own version of the American Dream.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story PDF Author: D. T. Max
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101601116
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.