Stephen Foster
American songwriter (1826-1864)
Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864), known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and folk music during the Romantic period. Foster wrote more than 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna", "Hard Times Come Again No More", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River"), "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "Old Black Joe", and "Beautiful Dreamer". Many of his compositions remain popular in the 21st century.
Early life
There are many biographies of Foster, but details differ widely. Among other issues, he wrote very little biographical information himself, and his brother Morrison Foster may have destroyed much information that he judged to reflect negatively upon the family.
Foster was born on July 4, 1826, in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. His parents, William Barclay Foster and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson Foster, were of Ulster Scots and English descent. Foster had three older sisters and six older brothers. He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, and received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics.
“Stephen Foster” enters the record as american songwriter (1826-1864). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stephen, Foster and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q305202. VIAF identifies the subject as 71577893. The Library of Congress control number is n50023175. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1826 and 1864.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stephen Foster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.