Don’t You Cry for Me
or, the ‘Beautiful Squander’ of Stephen Collins Foster
or, the treachery of ‘everybody’s doing it’
Projected 2026, Foster’s 200th birth year

Stephen Foster.  What a difficult character.  While so many musical hucksters were churning out garbage for the minstrel stage, here was a talent.  A man whose music and verse were a cut above.  So we should keep arrangements of Stephen Foster songs ringing from every concert hall in the land, right?  Well, maybe, maybe not.  In “Cora L, Imposter,” we asked a similar question about the renowned hymnist, Fanny Crosby, who wrote a handful of minstrel songs.  However, in her case, there was almost no offensive dialect.  Also, although in at least one song she paints that egregious “benevolent master” trope, the songs did not make buffoons of Enslaved People.  Unlike Crosby, Foster penned many unthinkable lyrics, not the least is the second verse of “Oh! Susannah,” where one finds the phrase, “kill’d five hundred n______.”

Does it make a difference that minstrelsy was so popular?  Does it matter that even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, hosted minstrel performances in the White House?  Is it important that some scholars claim that Foster had a “conversion” from the writing of plantation songs? It’s complicated.  Foster’s conversion experience is contested.  Some believe that he was trying to flee the low-brow nature of minstrelsy, not its offensiveness.  Yes, minstrelsy was wildly popular, but there were those who found it distasteful. But did those people find it merely artistically objectionable or downright immoral?  

“Don’t Cry for Me” will delve into this later question in great detail, attempting to ascertain to what degree minstrelsy was troubling to the people of the time, and by extension, to determine how forgiving today’s audiences might be to Foster, and how tainted even his non-racial works are by his substantial association with minstrelsy. This project will probably take the form of a lecture recital.