17 Facts About Stephen Foster

1.

Stephen Foster was born on July 4,1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania.

2.

Stephen Foster had three older sisters and six older brothers.

3.

Stephen Foster attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, and received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics.

4.

Stephen Foster taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute, and piano.

5.

In 1839, his brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at Towanda and thought that Stephen Foster would benefit from being under his supervision of Henry Kleber, a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh.

6.

Stephen Foster's tuition was paid, but he had little spending money.

7.

Stephen Foster left Canonsburg to visit Pittsburgh with another student and did not return.

8.

Many of Stephen Foster's songs were used in the blackface minstrel shows popular at the time.

9.

Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Stephen Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon.

10.

Available archival evidence does not suggest that Stephen Foster was an abolitionist.

11.

Stephen Foster's writing partner George Cooper found him still alive but lying in a pool of blood.

12.

Stephen Foster died in Bellevue Hospital three days later at the age of 37.

13.

The note inside Stephen Foster's wallet is said to have inspired Bob Hilliard's lyric for "Dear Hearts and Gentle People".

14.

Stephen Foster grew up in Lawrenceville, now a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where many European immigrants had settled and were accustomed to hearing the music of the Italian, Scots-Irish, and German residents.

15.

Stephen Foster composed his first song when he was 14 and entitled it the "Tioga Waltz".

16.

Stephen Foster authored many church hymns, although the inclusion of his hymns in hymnals ended by 1910.

17.

Stephen Foster usually sent his handwritten scores directly to his publishers.