Well, the words are in the database, but for some reason, I can't access this one song. I've searched under [Hard Times] and [Come Again No More]. The song comes up both times, but without a clickable link so I can access the lyrics (this is only on the online version - the song can be accessed on the PC version). Max? Dick?
-Joe-

---

Here's the Traditional Ballad Index entry:

Hard Times Come Again No More

DESCRIPTION: "Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears While we all sup sorrow with the poor." The singer describes sad people suffering from poverty, and begs, "Hard times, come again no more."
AUTHOR: Stephen C. Foster
EARLIEST DATE: 1854 (broadside, LOCSheet sm1854 760350)
KEYWORDS: poverty hardtimes
FOUND IN: US Britain(England(South))
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Wiltshire-WSRO Mi 588, "Hard Times Come Again No More"; Wiltshire-WSRO Mi 589, "Hard Times Come Again No More" (2 texts)
WolfAmericanSongSheets, #852, p. 57, "Hard Times Come Again No More" (1 reference)
Emerson, pp. 86-87, "Hard Times Come Again No More" (1 text)
DT, HRDTIMES*
Roud #2659
RECORDINGS:
Edison Quartette, "Hard Times Come Again No More" (CYL: Edison 9120, 1905)
L. M. Hilton, "Hard Times Come Again No More [Mormon version]" (on Hilton01)
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 11(866)[few words missing or illegible], "Hard Times Come Again No More" ("Let us pause in life [sic] pleasures and count its many tears"), J.B. Hodge (Sunderland), 1850-1861; also Harding B 11(3352), Harding B 11(1477), Harding B 11(1478), Harding B 11(1479), Firth c.16(246), Harding B 11(1687) , Harding B 11(1686), "Hard Times Come Again No More"
LOCSheet, sm1854 760350, "Hard Times Come Again No More", Firth, Pond, & Co. (New York), 1854; also sm1882 21586, "Hard Times Come Again No More" (tune)
LOCSinging, as105130, "Hard Times Come Again No More" ("While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay"), Firth, Pond, & Co. (New York), no date; also as105130, sb20165b, "Hard Times Come Again No More"
SAME TUNE:
Hard Crackers, Come Again No More (cf. Spaeth, _A History of Popular Music in America_, p. 116)
Sad Times. The Burning of the Steamboat New Jersy, on the Delaware, Night of March 15, 1856. Sixty-Two Persons Hurried into Eternity by Water and by Fire (by Ned Buntline) (WolfAmericanSongSheets p. 138)
Sorrow Shall Come Again No More ("What to me are earth's pleasures, and what its flowing tears") (WolfAmericanSongSheets p. 148)
NOTES: It is perhaps more a comment on the folk revival than on this song to note that it is easily the most popular Foster song with revival singers. It wasn't especially popular at the time, and Spaeth (A History of Popular Music in America, p. 116) regards it as an "adequate potboiler."
According to notes in Deems Taylor et al, A Treasury of Stephen Foster, Random House, 1946, p. 19, "Stephen once told his brother, Morrison, that Oh! Boys, Carry Me 'Long, and Hard Times Come Again No More were based on snatches of Negro melodies he heard in a Negro church to which he was taken in childhood by the family nurse, Olivia Pise. They are the only songs in which Foster admittedly used actual Negro material."
Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture, Da Capo, 1997?, p. 29, notes that Stephen Foster's parents lost their home very early in Foster's life, and suggests that "Foster would compose so many songs about home in part because he seldom knew one for long." - RBW
Last updated in version 3.5
File: DThrdtim

---

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2015 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.

---

Click here for sheet music at the Levy Sheet Music Collection - published 1854.
There's an answer song, Better Times Are Coming Bye and Bye, published in 1896.