ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)

Subject: Lyr Add: Stephen Foster Song (Teresina Huxtable)
From: Levana Taylor
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 03:47 AM

This song is transcribed from Ann Mayo Muir's singing on the album The Language of the Heart (1994).

(SING THAT) STEPHEN FOSTER SONG
by Teresina Huxtable
as sung by Ann Mayo Muir

          CHORUS:
          Is someone left to know the way,
          Protect us, bring us home again?
          Sit at table one more time,
          Sing that Stephen Foster song?

Those whose days were like your own
Are scattered now across the years,
Share no countries, plans, or times,
Though once we lived on common ground.

If we knew then of leaving home --
But tens and twelves are unafraid.
Foresight's dear and hindsight's not,
And far apart is how we've grown.

Roads and paths come overgrown,
Lose the time and lose the way.
Gather those around me now,
I set a table of my own.

-----------------------------------------

T:Stephen Foster Song
C:Teresina Huxtable
M:2/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=105
K:G major
B d | d>d | d>e | B2 | z B | A G |
w:Those whose days were like your own Are scat-tered
B>d | e>g | A2- | A z | B c | d d |
w:now a-cross the years_ Share no coun-tries
e d | c3/2 z/2 | G G/2B/2 | A G | B>A | G2- | G2 ||
w:plans or times Though once you lived on com-mon ground_ ||
z/2 G/2 B/2d/2 | d>d | d>e | B>B | A/2 G z/2 |
w:Is some-one left to know the way Pro-tect us,
B<d | e>g | A2 | z B/2c/2 | d d | e d |
w:bring us home a-gain Sit at ta-ble one more
c z | B d | e g | g>f | g2- | g2 ||
w:time Sing that Ste-phen Fos-ter song_

Subject: RE: ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)
From: leeneia
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 01:31 PM

Thank you for sharing. Singing a familiar Stephen Foster song together is an evocative image.

The abc file needs this on the first line   X:1 if it is to be converted to ordinary notation.

Subject: RE: ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)
From: Levana Taylor
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 02:00 PM

I don't think it does need the X -- abcConverter does fine without it, as does abcjs.

Subject: RE: ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)
From: Felipa
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 02:32 PM

I do sing a couple of Stephen Foster song.
But I opened the thread expecting a lyric more critical than praising. Foster wasn't particularly political; he was a commercial songwriter at a time when minstrel shows and blackface were popular , but Foster appears to me to have been an apologist for slavery, depicting the "darkies" as living in contentment.

I'm surprised to read that in his own time:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~amerimus/Fosterbiography.htm

Regardless of Foster’s personal opinions, many abolitionists favorably viewed his songs and performed them to help persuade more people to support the abolition of enslavement. Such plantation songs as “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” were frequently included in theatrical productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Moreover, the members of the Hutchinson family, renowned performers and abolitionists, included “Nelly Bly,” “Gentle Annie,” and “Old Folks at Home” in their activist concerts. Even Frederick Douglass celebrated plantation songs. In an 1855 address to the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, he stated,

    It would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs; those songs that constitute our national music, and without which we have no national music. They are heart songs, and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. “Lucy Neal,” “Old Kentucky Home,” and “Uncle Ned,” can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow and flourish. (p. 329)
-----
sources:
The Life and Music of Stephen Collins Foster
By Christopher Lynch (online, https://sites.pitt.edu/~amerimus/Fosterbiography.htm)

Douglass, Frederick. “The Anti-Slavery Movement, Lecture Delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, March 19, 1855.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Philip S. Foner, ed. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2000.

Subject: RE: ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)
From: Levana Taylor
Date: 04 Dec 21 - 03:41 PM

Yeah... Stephen Foster's works and words are a whole can of worms, in hindsight. At what point does "fair for his time" become not fair enough? The only song of his I have heard sung in public is "Hard Times Come Again No More." Then, too, snippets of "Camptown Races" and "Oh Susannah" used to get sung in my childhood, mostly just the chorus and folk-processed enough to be apparently de-minstrelized. I think it would not be far wrong to say love of Stephen Foster songs would be one of the whitest manifestations of current white American culture.

"Sing That Stephen Foster Song" puzzles, or troubles, me. It's a beautiful song, a great evocation of lost family togetherness, but why Stephen Foster? Perhaps it was the author's own family tradition when she wrote it back in the 1980s, nothing more than that. But there's a whole "ethos" attached to Foster's work as you say, which can't help coloring this song, coloring its evocation of "family."

I can't sing Bob Coltman's "Before They Close the Minstrel Show," either, excellent song though it is.

Subject: RE: ADD:Sing That Stephen Foster Song (Huxtable)
From: Joe Offer
Date: 05 Dec 21 - 03:23 AM

I have the Ann Mayo Muir recording on CD, but I can't find it on YouTube or Bandcamp. Here's a performance by Mike Agranoff. It's a beautiful song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPAH956qNHc