From the Back Cover
Stephen Foster tells the tragic story of America's first great songwriter, the man who wrote
Camptown Races, Beautiful Dreamer, Oh! Susanna and some 200 other popular songs. Foster, the son of a failed Pittsburgh businessman, displayed a prodigious talent early on. At the age of ten he was performing comic songs; by the time he was 18 he was composing the sort of melodies that would make him famous. Foster's music was full of contradictions. Some of his best-known songs exploited the offensive dialect and stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy. Yet his later work expressed sympathy for African Americans that abolitionist Frederick Douglass applauded. Though Foster virtually invented popular music as we recognize it today, his personal life was full of sadness and disappointments. His marriage was unhappy, he never made much money from his work and he died at a 37 penniless alcoholic on the Bowery in New York. Set to a lively score of 19th century music and sing beautifully filmed re-creations,
Stephen Foster charts the songwriter's meteoric rise, his lonely decline and celebrates the tremendous impact his music had on American popular culture.
