by Mark Steyn
Before his career went south, his songs did. Stephen Foster wrote “Ethiopian songs” for the minstrel shows and plantation ballads (“Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground”) for parlor pianos. For all the copious deployments of the D-word (“darkies”) that have to be airbrushed out in contemporary renditions, he brought the sensibility of the South vividly to life for Northern audiences in a way that no one else did. During the Civil War, his songs remained popular on both sides. But he was not a Southerner. He was born in a Pennsylvania town called Lawrenceville, just outside Pittsburgh, on the perfect day for a man whose songs would weave themselves into the fabric of the nation: the Fourth of July—and not just any Glorious Fourth but July 4, 1826, America’s fiftieth birthday and the day on which its second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both chanced to die.
After Tin Pan Alley got going in the 1890s, and even more so after ASCAP (the composers’ enforcement arm) came along, songwriting was a potentially very lucrative activity. But in the mid-nineteenth century it was a much more perilous way to make a living. You could pitch a song to a music publisher, but they generally offered only a one-time fee to purchase the composition outright. In 1848 Foster sold a number he’d written to the Peters firm in Cincinnati for one hundred dollars. It was an insistent polka-like melody with nonsense lyrics (“De sun so hot I froze to death”) called “Oh! Susanna.” Christy’s Minstrels, the biggest stars of the day, liked it enough to make it their theme song, and it became, without any help from radio or records or iTunes, a national hit. In theory, that should have been great news for its author. In practice, it meant that other minstrel troupes took up the song and published it under their own names in cities far away from Mr. Peters in Cincinnati. In the three years after its original publication, it was re-published and re-copyrighted—i.e., stolen—by at least twenty other publishers. Before “Oh! Susanna,” no American song had sold more than five thousand copies of sheet music. In nothing flat, “Oh! Susanna” sold over a hundred thousand copies—and all Stephen Foster had to show for it was that original hundred bucks.
Today, most Americans think of “Camptown Races,” “Old Black Joe,” “Nelly Was a Lady,” and the rest of the Foster catalogue as “folk songs”—numbers that just sprang up somewhere out of some vernacular musical tradition, rather than the fruits of one particular individual’s labor. But even at the time many Americans thought of Foster’s songs as “folk music”—the ’49ers who sang “Oh! Susanna” all the way to California assumed it was a folk tune; wasn’t everything? I mean, who expected to be paid for writing songs?
Stephen Foster did. Firth, Pond & Co. of New York noticed “Oh! Susanna” and its spectacular sales, and the following year—1849—offered Foster a contract to write songs for them for a royalty rate of two cents per copy of sheet music. And thus Stephen Foster became America’s first professional songwriter—that’s to say, the first man in America paid to write songs, rather than a blackface minstrel who happened to cook up his own material, like Dan Emmett (“Dixie”) or Thomas Rice (“Jump Jim Crow”). Writing songs was what he did: He composed music and lyrics, and then found someone else to sing them. On the strength of his Firth, Pond contract, Foster felt he was financially secure enough to marry his sweetheart Jane—the real-life Jeanie with the light brown hair—and in 1851 they had a daughter, Marion.
It never quite worked, not really. His parents died, his writing sputtered, Jane left him for a while and took Marion with her, his output dwindled further, to four songs a year—and his debts mounted. He persuaded Firth, Pond to advance him cash against future songs—and then found he had no future songs. The contract expired, and he sold his rights to pay his debts. Then came the Civil War. He moved with Jane and Marion to New York, but in 1861 they left—this time for good. Broke and abandoned, Stephen Foster was living the lyric he’d written the best part of a decade earlier:
’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door
Oh, Hard Times, come again no more. . . .
But they did, and they got harder, and on that bleak January day in 1864 they finally penetrated his cabin door. Two months later, in March 1864, Wm. A. Pond of New York (Mr. Pond having separated from Mr. Firth) published what he billed as “the last song ever written by Stephen C. Foster. Composed but a few days prior to his death.” On my own copy of the sheet music, printed shortly thereafter, Mr. Pond was more circumspect, calling it “one of the latest songs of Stephen C. Foster”—and, lest that confuse anyone who’d been reading the obituaries column, a parenthesis appears under his name: “Composed a short time before his death.” Presumably, all of his “latest songs” would have had to be “composed a short time before his death.” In those last grim years in New York, there were supposedly over a hundred of them, but, in one of his many moves from seedy rooming house to seedier rooming house, Foster’s trunk of manuscripts was lost and never found. And so there was only really one “latest song”—if not, as it’s often claimed to be, the very last song he ever wrote, then certainly the last Stephen Foster song to implant itself in the popular consciousness:
Beautiful Dreamer
Wake unto me
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee
Sounds of the rude world
Heard in the day
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
Who is he writing about? If, as some musicologists think, the song was composed in 1862—two years before his death—was it a lament for his wife Jane, recently decamped to Pennsylvania? Or is it merely a sentimental ballad by a professional songwriter, the first American paid to write such things? It’s a haunting tune in a 9/8 time signature and chock full of triplets—“beau-ti-ful”. . . “wake un-to”—that in the wrong hands would be awfully boring. But the melody is so pure and translucent it seems the very essence of song, a song that sounds as if it’s always been here, just waiting to be plucked from the air. And for Stephen Foster’s last hurrah it is appropriately a pledge of faith in the beguiling, transformative powers of music:
Beautiful Dreamer
Queen of my song
List while I woo thee with soft melody
Gone are the cares
Of life’s busy throng
Beautiful Dreamer
Awake unto me!
But the queen of his song is far away in another state, and the cares of life’s busy throng, the sounds of the rude world, are not gone but pressing in all around. Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Nelson Eddy, the Ink Spots, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Suzy Bogguss, Sheryl Crow, and thousands more sang “Beautiful Dreamer” in the course of the twentieth century. Not a soul sang it in Stephen Foster’s lifetime. The total musical earnings of his short time on earth came to $15,091.08. In the years after his death, his widow and daughter earned from “Beautiful Dreamer” and the rest of his catalogue a mere $4,199 between them. In the last hundred years, those songs would have been worth millions. But by then they were out of the copyright they’d never quite been in.
Along with the thirty-eight cents, they also found a scrap of paper with the penciled words “Dear friends and gentle hearts.” A title for a new song? Eighty-five years later, Sammy Fain, composer of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and Bob Hilliard, writer of “Our Day Will Come,” were sufficiently inspired by the tale of Stephen Foster’s last words to turn them around and write a song called “Dear Hearts and Gentle People”—a big hit for Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore but not the kind of tune Foster would have written on the theme.
Dear friends and gentle hearts: A century and a half ago, Stephen Foster could have used more of each. But he wrote “Beautiful Dreamer” in a flophouse, and it will live forever.
DECORATION DAY
The Chicago Sun-Times, May 30, 2004
MEMORIAL DAY IN my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf ma
rch round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays “Anchors Aweigh,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens’s “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)” (Billboard Number One, May 1970). One of the town’s selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettysburg Address and the Great War’s great poetry. There’s a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.
Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day—a day for going to the cemetery and “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.
I wish we still did that. Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840–1862. 1843–1864.
In my local cemetery, there’s a monument over three graves, forebears of my hardworking assistant, although I didn’t know that at the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert, and his sister’s fiancé, Charles Lovejoy, had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5, 1863, Turner on March 6, and John on March 11. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.
For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mix-up, as there often is, and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the station master didn’t want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.
When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin, and the man to whom you’re betrothed.
That’s a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three plain tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she’d form a group of victims’ families. Maybe she’d call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she’d be booing and chanting during the officials’ testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s statement.
All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The sight of unkempt lice-infested Saddam Hussein yanked from his spider hole last December is not so very different from the published reports of Jefferson Davis’s capture in May 1865, when he was said to be trying to skulk away in women’s clothing, and spent the next several months being depicted by gleeful Northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats, and crinolines (none of which he was actually wearing).
But, conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky greys of post-war reconstruction. You think Iraq’s a quagmire? Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” bogged down into a century-long quagmire of segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan. Does that mean that, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln lied to us?
Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it’s not obvious which side to be on until the dust’s settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War my small town’s menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters’ point. More than six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War—or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in the Afghan-Iraq wars, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.
But that’s the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren’t a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screw-ups worth re-examining, but they weren’t a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn’t lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree, as the Democrats do over Abu Ghraib. They were not a people willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it’s pain-free, squeaky-clean, and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we’re supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.
Time passes, and moss and lichen creep across ancient grave stones. But the men beneath them are forever young. As I mentioned above, at Memorial Day observances in my neck of the woods the veterans are honored by the fifth-graders, who read verses for the occasion—both the classics and their own poems. The latter can be a bit hit and miss, and one has to be alert, given the dispositions of some of my neighbors, for give-peace-a-chance war-is-never-the-answer not-so-subtle subtexts. But a few years after the above column my then fifth-grade daughter was asked to write something, and so she did. Nothing to do with me—I was away in Chicago all that week—but I was pleased to see that all the rhymes are true. She is older now and has gotten a little teenagey, as they do, and today she would try to write it more sophisticatedly. But I have always liked its heartfelt directness. So this is my daughter Ceci’s fifth-grade poem, as a ten-year-old girl delivered it on a small town common in New Hampshire for Memorial Day:
The stars and stripes, red, white, and blue
Wave above our heroes true
It makes us cry, it makes us weep
But in our hearts we will keep
The sacrifice our soldiers gave, they shall not die in vain
For they have given us the freedom they have fought to gain.
SAY, IT AIN’T SO JOE
Maclean’s, September 24, 2007
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I played with GI Joe. At my age, it tends to attract stares from the playground security guard. Nevertheless, I vaguely recall two details about the prototype “action figure”: (1) he was something to do with—if you’ll pardon the expression—the U.S. military; and (2) he had no private parts.
Flash forward to 2007 and this news item in Variety about the forthcoming live-action GI Joe movie:
While some remember the character from its gung-ho fighting man ’60s incarnation, he’s evolved. GI Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international coed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film.
Golly. So much for my two childhood memories: (1) he’s no longer anything to do with the U.S. military; and (2) the guys with no private parts are the execs at Paramount and Hasbro who concluded that an American serviceman would be too tough a sell in the global marketplace. “GI Joe is not just a brand that represents the military,” says Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s chief operating officer. “It also represents great characters.” And nothing says great characters like a Belgian bureaucracy.
The “evolution�
� of GI Joe is an instructive one. The term “GI” stands for “Galvanized Iron” (which so much army stuff was made of that the initials became a routine speed bump in military bookkeeping) and not, as many assume, for “General Infantry.” But it was certainly the poor bloody infantry who embraced the abbreviation, initially for the stuff they were on the receiving end of: In the Great War, U.S. troops used to refer to incoming German artillery shells as “GI cans.” By the next global conflict, it was firmly established as an instantly recognizable shorthand for the regular enlisted man, as in Johnny Mercer’s hit song:
This is the GI Jive
Man alive!
It starts with the bugler blowin’ reveille over your head when you arrive
Jack, that’s the GI Jive
Root-tee-tee-toot
Jump in your suit
Make a salute
Voot!
Who wouldn’t love the American GI? He was the citizen soldier—the hapless farmer, the befuddled accountant, the amiable grease monkey, pressed into service to save places like Belgium from the depredations of darker forces. It was the cartoonist David Breger who made him the formal embodiment of the men in uniform. “GI Joe” debuted in Yank, The Army Weekly, in 1942 and planted a phrase in the language:
When the war was over