Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth

Decades after his death, Stephen C. Foster's (1826—64) family and fans seized upon his birth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and his role in the burgeoning US music industry to mythologize him as a founding father in American cultural history. Hailing him as the father of American music and symbol of US democracy at the end of the nineteenth century required the collective forgetting of certain facts of his life, particularly his initial rise to fame through c...