By Cole Davis
Riverbend News
The tune is as popular as the river is travelled. Stephen Foster’s 1851 “Old Folks at Home” or “Suwannee River” (as it is more colloquially known today) has had such an indelible impact on the popular perception of that river that one cannot mention its name without also calling to mind the famous song. As a matter of fact, before Foster’s tune reached the degree of popularity that it eventually would, few people outside of Florida and Georgia didn’t even know the “Suwannee River” was a real place at all. Foster himself had never been there, and his brother, after having consulted an atlas, called out “Suwannee!” in a eureka moment just because it fit the melody of the tune being written. Nevertheless, it was adopted and adored by Floridians and it was made the state song in 1935.
Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pa., in 1826 and although he had only visited the South once, many of his tunes featured themes that were culturally and lyrically southern. American songbook staples such as “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Beautiful Dreamer” are all testaments to his composition.
His contributions to American music and to Florida culture are usually celebrated yearly at the Florida Folk Festival in White Springs. This has been canceled due to reasons of which I do not need to call the reader’s attention. However, one can still appreciate this legend of American music at the Stephen Foster Antebellum Museum and Stephen Foster Folk Center in White Springs.
Although he came from a time with an entirely different value system from our own, with perceptions of morality that seem alien to us, there is much about him and his work that is worth celebrating. Despite this fact, as with many other figures in the American story, Foster has slowly been “un-personed” in the classic Orwellian style by those who have forsaken this law of history: iconoclasm never ends well. In a time where so many people are quick to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in regards to anything that does not fit a progressive narrative, it is of utmost importance that we preserve the value that those in the past, Stephen Foster included, have to offer us.