Songs of Stephen Foster

Songs of Stephen Foster, issued as the University of Pittsburgh Edition, collects 41 Foster songs with piano accompaniment. The editors were Will Earhart and Edward B. Birge, both central figures in American school music: Earhart directed music in the Pittsburgh public schools from 1912 to 1940 and founded the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public School Music in 1913, and Birge supervised music in the Indianapolis schools before heading public school music at Indiana University. The collection first appeared in 1934 as the Foster Hall edition, printed privately by Josiah Kirby Lilly of Indianapolis, the retired president of Eli Lilly and Company, who had begun assembling first editions of Foster’s songs in 1931 along with portraits, correspondence, and other documentation of the composer’s life. Lilly kept the material in a building on his estate that had originally been put up to hold a pipe organ and was renamed Foster Hall. In 1937 he gave the collection to the University of Pittsburgh, where it remains as the Foster Hall Collection at the Center for American Music, and transferred the publication rights to this book along with it. The University of Pittsburgh Edition reprints that 1934 selection, its preface describing the collection as presented for the second time, and it was issued in numerous printings from 1938 into the 1970s. The copy described here is the 1953 printing.

The selection spans Foster’s working life, from “Open Thy Lattice, Love” of 1844, his first published song, to “Beautiful Dreamer,” which appeared two months after his death in 1864. It mixes the parlor ballads with the blackface minstrel songs written for Christy’s Minstrels, and includes pieces that had largely fallen out of circulation by the mid twentieth century, among them “Nell and I,” “Parthenia to Ingomar,” and “Beautiful Child of Song.” The paper-wrappered edition sold for 25 cents.

NOTE: Vintage 1953 book purchased at an antique mall in Maryland, 2025.