Musical AH Challenge: Stephen Foster romanticizes the northeast

I'll grant that lyrics like "Oh, the sun shines bright on my old New Jersey home..." or "Way down upon the Susquehanna / Far, far away..." don't have quite the ring as do Foster's originals. (I have no clue what to substitute for "Tennessee" in "Nelly Bly".)

So how do we get a guy from Pittsburgh who lived much of his life in Cincy and spent little time in the south to focus instead upon the cradle of America's industrial revolution, rather than on the would-be Confederacy?
 
I'll grant that lyrics like "Oh, the sun shines bright on my old New Jersey home..." or "Way down upon the Susquehanna / Far, far away..." don't have quite the ring as do Foster's originals. (I have no clue what to substitute for "Tennessee" in "Nelly Bly".)

So how do we get a guy from Pittsburgh who lived much of his life in Cincy and spent little time in the south to focus instead upon the cradle of America's industrial revolution, rather than on the would-be Confederacy?
Like Carl Sandburg, but set to music?
 
i don't know anything about Foster but I would bet that the imagery of the south is better. I mean rolling hills and majestic vistas or factories and tenements? I am guessing it was an artistic decision.
 
i don't know anything about Foster but I would bet that the imagery of the south is better. I mean rolling hills and majestic vistas or factories and tenements? I am guessing it was an artistic decision.

You can get romantic about anything. A shedload of the better British folk music is about the grand ships, giant factories and happy tenements that the industrial workers lived around (though much of the shite that sells to tourists is abour bonnie glens and fair maidens a-milking). And the South really isn't any more inherently grand or pretty than the Northeast. You can sing about the hills of Massachussetts in Indian Summer, the Erie Canal, the villages of Maine and the farming towns of Ohio as easily as the Ole' Man River, the Hills of Tennessee or the Wabash Cannonball.

I suspect the fact that Southern and Western romanticism has won out is, perversely, the fact that it was alien to the largest concentration of customers. For a long time in the early stages of the music industry, the people who bought these songs (and the other articles of this romantic culture) lived in the Northeastern corner of the country. To them, the Appalachians were exotic and the Mississippi or the Rockies a foreign universe with fascinating inhabitants. Indian Summer, maple syrup pancakes, little fishing craft, ice ponds and cranberry bogs were just stuff. They had that, they really didn't need songs about it.

There are songs about all of these things, incidentally. It's just the they're far less well known and far less central to the American national imaginary. For me, this is very strange, because I'm a second-gemeration emigrant with family roots in the Northeast, so to us, Upstate New York is 'the old country' and the romance of America to a large degree consists of maple syrup, industrial tenements, downtown shopping streets with their kosher delis and Italian groceries, forests red with autumn, little lakes in the woods and tuna-noodle hotdish. Frozen at some indefinite point halfway between VE-Day and Woodstock, the way it's always 1921 for the Boston Irish.
 
Top