4 Songs

Beautiful Child of Song (1860)

Linger in Blissful Repose (1858)

If You’ve only got a Moustache (1864)

Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway! (1850)

If Stephen Foster had not existed America would have had to invent him - although the relevant authorities would surely have avoided having him born on such an obvious date as 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence and the day that Thomas Jefferson died. A hero-figure for that other great original of American music, Charles Ives, he enjoyed more life-time success as a composer than Ives did, but not that much: he somehow lost the rights to much of what he had written and when he died, drinking heavily and separated from his wife, he was virtually penniless. It was only after his death that the most successful of his love songs, Beautiful Dreamer, was published and it was only fifty or sixty years ago that Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair became a popular hit.

Although his minstrel songs, like Camptown Races and Old Folks at Home, earned him 90% of his income, they represent a small proportion of his output, which is made up largely of parlour ballads together with a handful of music-hall songs and Sunday-School hymns. In most cases he set his own words, as in Beautiful Child of Song, which he contributed to Clark’s School Visitor in 1860, and the serenade Linger in Blissful Repose, written in popular-operatic style two years earlier. If You’ve only got a Moustache, on the other had, is one of several comic songs written in collaboration with the vaudeville lyricist and performer George Cooper in the 1860s. The earliest song in the present group, Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway!, again to Foster’s own words, is included by connoisseurs among the very best of his parlour ballads.