Got ten horses in my pack,
Leader he is blind,
Lord it nearly broke my heart when they sold my Angeline.



Stephen Foster, as with Seeger family, and Lomax's and the Carter family, were little by way of craftspeople, and more by way of catalogers. Through the years the songs that they gathered have become intermingled with the songs that they indeed did write and/or arrange. It frustrates me a little to think that american cultural history was and maybe still is up for grabs. Stephen Foster is credited with many songs he didn't write. He did arrange them, adjust them to serve as minstrelsy, and to be consumed in american theaters and parlors, but my feeling is that to consider his versions definitive strictly because they were written down is to forget the importance of the songs as culture.