"Subject: RE: Why does modern music sound so different
From: GUEST,Hi Lo - PM
Date: 20 Apr 15 - 07:49 PM

The great StePhen Foster has stayed with us, and his sOngs seem very much in pop tradition of his time. Now they seem be in the folk tradition."
if you had read one of my earlier posts, I mentioned Stephen Foster, I also mentioned how one of his songs[ GENTLE ANNIE] had been improved by the folk process, However, Foster drew from roots Music, and though he attempted to write for money [was not successful at the time, perhaps his songs were not commercial enough?] his commercial situation like the broadsheet writers, was very different from the manufactured and artificially produced pop bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s, these bands are in fact in different situations to sixties pop bands ,most of whom had served their time gigging, beatles stones etc .
Rob Naylor, we wil have to agree to disagree.
to ilustrate my points about Foster read this cut and paste carefully hilo.
Foster attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania. He received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. In 1839, his elder brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at nearby Towanda and thought Stephen would benefit from being under his supervision. The site of the Camptown Races is 30 miles from Athens and 15 miles from Towanda. Stephen attended Athens Academy from 1839 to 1841. He wrote his first composition, Tioga Waltz, while attending Athens Academy and performed it during the 1841 commencement exercises; he was 14. It was not published during the composer's lifetime, but it is included in the collection of published works by Morrison Foster. In 1842, Athens Academy was destroyed in a fire.[citation needed]

Foster's education included a brief period at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, (now Washington & Jefferson College).[1][nb 1] His tuition was paid, but he had little spending money.[1] Sources conflict on whether he left willingly or was dismissed,[3] but, either way, he left Canonsburg to visit Pittsburgh with another student and did not return.[1]

During his teenage years, Foster was influenced greatly by two men. Henry Kleber (1816–1897), one of Stephen's few formal music instructors, was a classically trained musician who emigrated from Darmstadt, Germany, to Pittsburgh and opened a music store. Dan Rice was an entertainer, a clown, and blackface singer, making his living in traveling circuses. Although respectful of the more civilized parlor songs of the day, Rice and his friends would often sit at a piano, writing and singing minstrel songs through the night. Eventually, Foster learned to blend the two genres to write some of his best-known work.[citation needed]

In 1846, Foster moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and became a bookkeeper with his brother's steamship company. While he was in Cincinnati, Foster penned his first successful songs—among them "Oh! Susanna," which became an anthem of the California Gold Rush—in 1848–1849. In 1849, he published Foster's Ethiopian Melodies, which included the successful song "Nelly Was a Lady", made famous by the Christy Minstrels. A plaque marks the site of Foster's residence in Cincinnati, where the Guilford School building is now located.

Then he returned to Pennsylvania and signed a contract with the Christy Minstrels. It was during this period that Foster would write most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Old Folks at Home" (known also as "Swanee River", 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), and "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane Denny McDowell.

Many of Foster's songs were of the blackface minstrel show tradition popular at the time. Foster sought, in his own words, to, "build up taste ... among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order." Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once in 1852, by riverboat voyage on his honeymoon on his brother Dunning's steamboat the Millinger, which took him down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Foster attempted to make a living as a professional songwriter and may be considered innovative in this respect, since this field did not yet exist in the modern sense. Due in part to the limited scope of music copyright and composer royalties at the time, Foster realized very little of the profits his works generated for sheet music printers. Multiple publishers often printed their own competing editions of Foster's tunes, paying Foster nothing. He received $100 ($2,653 in 2012 dollars) for "Oh, Susanna" and barely made anything for his many other, popular songs.[citation needed]

Foster moved to New York City in 1860. About a year later, his wife and daughter left him and returned to Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1862, his fortunes decreased, and as they did, so did the quality of his new songs. Early in 1863, he began working with George Cooper, whose lyrics were often humorous and designed to appeal to musical theater audiences. The Civil War created a flurry of newly written music with patriotic war themes, but this did not benefit Foster. During this time he composed a series of Sunday School hymns, including "Give Us This Day"