Lyrics of the First Great Popular Songs (American Poets Project) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1598530704 ISBN 13: 9781598530704

Publisher: Library of America, 2010

Synopsis

Stephen Foster is the trunk of the tree of American song. His blackface minstrel songs, including “Oh! Susanna,” “Old Folks at Home” (“Way down upon the Swanee River...”), and “My Old Kentucky Home,” and his parlor ballads, such as “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” have inspired composers, songwriters, and performers from Charles Ives and George Gershwin to Ray Charles and James Taylor. Foster devoted as much care and craft to his lyrics as he did to his timeless melodies.

In this comprehensive new selection, acclaimed music historian Ken Emerson introduces and annotates the lyrics to more than thirty of Foster’s best and best-known songs. These masterpieces by America’s first full-time professional songwriter, forebear of Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Carole King, and Bob Dylan, have been so deeply absorbed into our culture that they are often assumed to be folk music. Alongside are fifty other 19th-century American popular songs that influenced Foster or that he in turn influenced, from “Home! Sweet Home!” in the 1820s to “Western Home” (the original “Home on the Range”) in the 1870s.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

About this title

About the Author:

Ken Emerson is the author of Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture and Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era.

From Booklist:

Half a century ago, Rocky and Bullwinkle depended on their kids-to-codgers TV audience knowing enough nineteenth-century poems to include a poetry-reading spot. That probably wouldn’t fly nowadays. Use, however, another species of nineteenth-century verse—namely, the lyrics of the period’s pop-song hits, the likes of “Dixie,” “Clementine,” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”—and a similar feature might. Pop-song scholar Emerson presents 81 such songs in their earliest incarnations in this neat collection, sorting them in categories that, used in their heyday, still make sense: “Plantation Melodies,” “Parlor Songs,” “Drinking and Temperance Songs,” “Songs of Protest and Poverty,” “War Songs,” and “Comic Songs.” The volume’s star is Stephen Foster, 32 of whose song lyrics appear; he wrote most of them, though not those of the late comic numbers included. Briefly prefacing each category, Emerson acknowledges racism and ethnic stereotyping in many songs and also points out when a piece’s import is antislavery or in-group comedy rather than derogatory. More explanatory notes might be nice, but this is essential Americana, anyway. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1598530704
• ISBN 13: 9781598530704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204
• Editor: Ken Emerson