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Stephen Foster was the first full-fledged American composers, born, no less, on the Fourth of July, 1826, near Pittsburgh. Anyone who ever sat for a piano lesson has played his favorites including “Oh! Susanna”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair“, and “Beautiful Dreamer.” By the age of twenty-five Foster had published twelve original songs and had engaged in earnest as a professional composer.
He labored to make his songs appeal to the sentiments of his contemporary America, and he is considered the country’s first pop artist. However, the struggle to get paid for his work was the things that did him in. Foster attempted to keep an exact accounting and even wrote out the first semblance of a royalty contract with the publisher, but he couldn’t prevent another sheet music company from printing and selling his songs royalty-free. Nor did he receive anything for performance rights.
For a lifetime of labor he earned $15, 091.08, all the while composing, bickering to get paid, and drinking. Drinking he did with equal passion so that by the age of thirty-seven he was holed up in a cheap hotel room in New York City’s theatre district suffering from fever induced by alcoholism and liver failure. The exact cause of his death was lacerations to his head. When he tried to get out of bed, he fell and shattered a porcelain washbasin, suffering a deep gouge. It took three hours before he was taken to the hospital, where he died three days later in 1864. He had thirty-eight cents in his pockets.
To learn more about Stephen Foster and others like him who left their mark on the American West read More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.
