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Stephen Collins Foster: A Biography of America's Folk-Song Composer
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
- GenresMusic
158 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
November 12, 2018
4,5 + 0,5 just for Stephen.
A really interesting biography. The book is filled with letters from Stephen to his family and producers and viceversa with the subsequent comment of the author. There are some old pictures of him, too.
I really liked the author's comments on Foster's music. Milligan was a music critic and you can clearly sense it. At the end of the biography there's a eight page chapter where he analyses the musical style of Stephen Foster, without sparing him some criticism, and he also reflects on the role of music at those times and how it was percieved by the average American. I hoped there would have been an analysis of his lyrics, too, but there was none. I was also a little disappointed by the fact that the author never mention "Beautiful Dreamer", which I consider one of the best song ever written by Stephen, together with "The Old Folks at Home", of course. He says that the latter is the most famous song of Stephen. Well, that may be true in the USA, but here in Europe I would say that the most widespread is "Oh! Susanna", even though in its childish and censored version.
It was also interesting that this book was written in 1920 and the author writes that at that time there had been a controversy about the use of Foster's songs in schools because of the words "nigger" and "darkey". Times haven't changed since then, have they?
A really interesting biography. The book is filled with letters from Stephen to his family and producers and viceversa with the subsequent comment of the author. There are some old pictures of him, too.
I really liked the author's comments on Foster's music. Milligan was a music critic and you can clearly sense it. At the end of the biography there's a eight page chapter where he analyses the musical style of Stephen Foster, without sparing him some criticism, and he also reflects on the role of music at those times and how it was percieved by the average American. I hoped there would have been an analysis of his lyrics, too, but there was none. I was also a little disappointed by the fact that the author never mention "Beautiful Dreamer", which I consider one of the best song ever written by Stephen, together with "The Old Folks at Home", of course. He says that the latter is the most famous song of Stephen. Well, that may be true in the USA, but here in Europe I would say that the most widespread is "Oh! Susanna", even though in its childish and censored version.
It was also interesting that this book was written in 1920 and the author writes that at that time there had been a controversy about the use of Foster's songs in schools because of the words "nigger" and "darkey". Times haven't changed since then, have they?
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review