Photograph of Stephen Foster (1836)
Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps due to some sort of cosmic fate, July 4, 1826 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the day Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, and the day the first iconic American composer, Steven Foster, was born.

Other than "Yankee Doodle," most of what can be considered early American folk-music traces back to Stephen Foster. His songs were extremely popular in nineteenth century United States, and remained popular in the twentieth century (in no small part due to their frequent appearance in Looney Tunes shorts.)

Born in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, Foster received a basic classical education and was self-taught in music, playing the flute, clarinet, piano, and guitar. In 1847, he moved to Pittsburgh and started performing at an ice cream parlor. His first hit was "Oh! Susanna," which became an anthem for the "Forty-Niners" during the California Gold Rush of 1849. He got married in 1850. In 1860, he moved to New York, possibly to be further away from the Civil War. He died four years later at the age of 37, possibly due to a self-inflicted wound. He was found in his apartment with a scrap of paper that said only, "Dear friends and gentle people."

Structurally, Foster's songs tend to be Lieder just like Franz Schubert's, written for solo voice, accompanied either by a piano (or often a banjo) and structurally strophic, arranged by verses. Most of his music is associated with the American South, although Foster was a northerner.

Foster's song The Old Folks at Home, better known by its first line, Way Down upon the Suwanee River, has been the official state song of Florida since 1935. The song's lyrics are written in the voice of a person from Florida talking about how much he misses his home, although Foster himself never visited Florida. The Florida state legislature revised the lyrics in 2008, due to perceived racial insensitivities.