I grew up singing many of Stephen Foster’s well-known songs, particularly “Oh Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” (aka “Swanee River”). But I don’t remember ever thinking about (or being asked to think about) what I was singing, only that they were catchy and fun songs.

But I digress and want to go back to Foster.

I do remember being taught that Foster, who died on January 13, 1864, was a great American composer. This assessment is consistent with his presence on today’s #stampoftheday, a 1-cent stamp. He was one of five composers who were part of the 35-stamp “Famous Americans” series of stamps issued in 1940. The others were John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, Edward McDowell, and Ethelbert Nevin. Of these, Foster and Sousa are still well-known (or were when I was growing up); the other three have long-since become quite obscure.

The missing discussions and information about Foster are important because many of his lyrics express distasteful racial ideas. Moreover, many were written in black dialect and performed in black face.

This strongly suggests that it’s time to retire Foster – who wrote more than 200 songs including “Hard Times Come Again No More.” “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” Perhaps he should be sent to wherever we send a variety of other previously well-regarded Americans – such as Robert E. Lee or Woodrow Wilson – who we’ve since concluded had way too many odious views.

But perhaps it’s more complicated than it appears. That’s the argument that music historian Ken Emerson made in a 1997 biography of Foster. “Although some of Foster’s blackface lyrics are abhorrent—the second verse of “Oh! Susanna” is a shocker—at their best they imbue African Americans with a dignity and pathos that were unprecedented,” he wrote. “No songwriter had called a black woman a ‘lady’ before ‘Nelly Was a Lady.’ Unbeknown to most of the throng that sings bowdlerized lyrics on Derby Day, ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ does not celebrate cavaliers and crinolines in the Old South—it invokes ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and indicts slavery for breaking up black families.”

I for one, never learned any of that in school. And here’s something else I didn’t learn in school.

According Emerson, the famous ”Doo-dah!” refrain in ”Camptown Races” might well have been Foster imitating the cries made by hookers working the crowds at the illegal nighttime races held in shantytowns on the fringes of respectable communities.

I’m pretty sure that information would have greatly altered my view of the song; and the views of many of my contemporaries as well.

I might also have been intrigued by Foster’s personal story, which makes the story of songs both stranger and sadder. A native of western Pennsylvania, he wrote songs that we associate with the pre-Civil War southern states. But he never set foot in Kentucky or Alabama and never saw the Suwannee (not Swanee) River.

Moreover, the Camptown racetrack is located in Pennsylvania not, as most people believe, in the Deep South. As Michael Friedman noted in The New Yorker, this means that “Southern nostalgia was, in part, invented by a Yankee who spent almost no time in the South, long before the South was even something to be nostalgic about.”

It’s also interesting to learn that Foster was America’s first true professional songwriter. He spent much of his life in Pittsburgh, which meant his catchy songs quickly travelled down the nation’s major rivers. And his songs were quite popular. Music publishers sold more than 100,000 copies of “O Susannah,” his first hit; before then, no more than 5,000 copies of a song had been sold.

However, Foster was writing at a time before songwriters received royalties, so he was often broke. In fact (and as I also didn’t learn when I was young), he was an alcoholic who was penniless when he died at age 37. Moreover, the commonly told tale was that Foster, who was weakened from a fever, suffered serious injuries after he fell while shaving in the Bowery flophouse where he lived But, in recent decades, many historians have concluded that he committed suicide. Among the evidence for this view is the fact that many of his late songs seem to foreshadow his death, including “Beautiful Dreamer,” which was published after he died.

All of this puts Foster in a very different light. As Emerson told “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, “Stephen Foster really did create popular music as we still recognize it today, and he did it because he took together all these strands of the American experience….[In addition,] he clearly, effectively merged [other ethnic genres] into a single music. And I think he merged them in a way that appeals to the multicultural mongrel experience of America in its history and culture.”

All this leaves me with some questions.

– Do other people remember learning his songs in school?
If so, did they also not learn about or think about the lyrics to those songs?

– Do school-aged kids still learn (or know) Stephen Foster songs?
If not, when did they stop learning them?

– If they are still learning them, what, if anything, are they being taught about what the songs are saying>
And what, if anything, are they learning about the man who wrote them?

Be well, stay safe, think carefully before singing out the words “Doo-dah,” fight for justice, and work for peace.

PS: did anyone else also grow up singing “Dixie,” a song Foster didn’t write but that also has a meaning and a past that didn’t get discussed at the time?