New Stephen Foster CD

Subject: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 07:42 PM

One of the ladies in the Stephen Foster Music Club here in town gave me a copy of a review of a new CD - she knows about my interest in folk music and Mudcat activity. If anyone is interested, PM me, and I think I can scan the newspaper article.

A few lines from the article:

His classic songs grew out of one of the greatest periods of racial and social upheaval in this nation's history and are so embedded in America's musical fabric they can seem more the product of folk tradition than the pen of one man.

...Stepehn Foster, widely considered the first quintessentially American songwriter, whose music Dylan, amony others, has cited as a profound influence on his own.

..."Beautiful Dreamer - The Songs of Stephen Foster"...spans such widely known compositions as "Oh! Susanna," "Camptown Races" and "Hard Times Come Again No More," along with less frequently performed tunes, including "Don't Bet Money on the Shanghai,""No One to Love" and "Nelly Was a Lady."

"He [Foster] had an epiphany in the middle of his career when he realized these minstrel songs he'd been writing had been tasteless,"...

Alison Krauss, Mavis Staples, Roger McGuinn, Michelle Shocked and the Mavericks' Raul Malo are among the singers on an album that aims to raise Foster's profile among pop, country, folk and rock listeners.

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Joybell
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 08:08 PM

I read that review here in an Australian paper. It sounds great. Foster was so popular here that the Cornish Association regard him as a sort of honorary Cornishman. Misconceptions have been spread around about him since about the 1970s and it's really sad. It's worth taking a look at the memorial site where his true story is related. It's here:
http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/foster.htm
Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 08:17 PM

G'day Joybell,

Of course, here in Australia, we have that effort by which Gordon Parsons re-shuffled the words of Paddy Sheehan's WW II poem The Pub Without Beer, adding a few friends' names ... and lifting the "A" part of Foster's tune for Beautiful Dreamer to claim The Pub With No Beer ...©!

Regard(les)s,

Bob

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Joybell
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 08:46 PM

Hello Bob, Yes I felt quite alone there back when "The Pub With No Beer" was first released. Nobody believed me when I said it was "Beautiful Dreamer". "Gentle Annie" spawned an Aussie song too, but that was further back. Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: masato sakurai
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 09:13 PM

Beautiful Dreamer - The Songs of Stephen Foster (sound clips)

From here: "American Roots Publishing's debut release, Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster, is nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Traditional Folk Album category. Grammy Awards are handed out on February 13, 2005 at 8pm ET/PT on CBS. ..."

Subject: RE: Alan Offa -bassist
From: GUEST,Janice
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 09:26 PM

So Bob,
I read a long thread ago that you knew of a man named Alan Offa.The uncle of your old friend Eva Gaddes.
Could it be Alan Offa, the bassist, formerly of Caterham in Surrey, England?
And could you be in touch with him now? And could you tell him I am asking after him?
Ask him did he play with Iain MacLeod?

Janice

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 10:05 PM

Do they still sing the real words to "My Old Kentucky Home in the US of A? I would love to hear those crowds react to :

The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,
'Tis summer, the darkies are gay.

My guess is that the politicly correct citizens of your country would pretty much shoot anyone who sang Mr. Foster's songs the way they actually were written. What a shame. They are great songs though.

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 10:44 PM

I recently bought this CD, and while it is very good, there are other Foster LPs and CDs which are truer and more inclusive. As to Foster's so-called mid-career epiphany about the music, I believe Ken Emerson, the author of the CD notes, indulges in a bit of revisionist history. He cites the last song in dialect as being Don't Bet on the Shanghai, 1861...Foster died Jan '64. I suspect that Foster was a faithful recorder of the poor Negro's dialect of his time, just as Joel Chandler Harris was for the Uncle Remus stories. Of course, to our 21st century sensibilities these sound racist, and are off-putting.

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 02 Jan 05 - 11:14 PM

I don't know about Foster's so-called epiphany - but quoting the review:

Fishel said, "Some of those lyrics are very offensive today. But he came to realize that and went so far as to withhold songs from established artists like the Christy's Minstrels. ..."Foster said, 'Cut out these (offensive) songs or I won't give you any of my new material.'

Thanks Masato, those are nice sound clips.

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: open mike
Date: 03 Jan 05 - 12:15 AM

yes i have this too, for my radio show. wonderful...info here:

http://www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/foster.htm (bio)

http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/archives/asc66/ (sound byte here)

http://www.americanrootspublishing.org/ these are the folks who produced
it...
and it is featured in the issue #115 of dirty Linen magazine ..........dec 04/jan 05

Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster is nominated
for a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album

http://www.americanrootspublishing.org/scf/

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Arkie
Date: 03 Jan 05 - 12:51 AM

I also have this CD and have have enjoyed it, though some songs more than others. The performers make no attempt to do period presentations of the songs and in most cases I thought the songs worked pretty well done in a more contemporary style.

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 03 Jan 05 - 01:53 AM

G'day,
GUEST,Janice:

I reckon we have a different Alan Offa ... he was a mouth organ player, born in 1920 at Kingaroy, Queensland, Australia ... presumably descended from the 1880s wave of "Germanic" immigrants (the last refugees from Bismarck's conquest [aka "Unification"] of the independent German states).

Many of this group settled as farmers in the south-east parts of Queensland and still maintain strong German traditions ... despite prejuduce arising from two World Wars - basically against the Germans that their ancestors came to Australia to avoid! Parts of Eva's family would also trace their Australian period to that migration.

Alan's version of Man You Don't Meet Every Day, which I use with a very pretty version of its waltz tune, collected from another "Germanic"-Australian, Ernie Goodman in New South Wales, is a short portion of an American version of the song, that came to Alan via his father from an Irishman, Paddy Fitzgerald, with whom he worked down south in Victoria ... around 1900.

I think that comprises a fairly good Australian pedigree for a song fragment!

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: New Stephen Foster CD
From: Joybell
Date: 03 Jan 05 - 05:33 PM

As is noted on the Stephen Foster memorial site, Foster stopped writing in the popular "Darkie dialect" very early. Only his earliest songs use it. He instructed Black-face minstrels to portray slaves in a more dignified way. His songs did much to show that familar attitudes about family, home, love and friendship were also part of the lives of the slaves.
Cheers, Joy