cover image Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture

Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture

Ken Emerson. Simon & Schuster, $29.5 (416pp) ISBN 978-0-684-81010-2

Emerson, essayist and editor (Newsday, the New York Times Magazine), has written about music for the past 25 years. Now he explores the roots of early popular music while tracing the tragic life of composer Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864), who wrote nearly 200 songs. Some became much-loved American classics--""Oh! Susannah"" (1848), ""Camptown Races"" (1850), ""Old Folks at Home"" (1851, aka ""Swanee River""), ""My Old Kentucky Home"" (1853), ""Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair"" (1854) and ""Old Black Joe"" (1860). Yet Foster is a songwriter whose tunes are better known than he is: born on the 4th of July in what is now Pittsburgh, Foster and his songs were identified with the South--although he had lived only in the North, and had written about the South before ever having seen it. In addition to his sentimental songs and parlor ballads, he also wrote his ""Ethiopian Melodies"" for E.P. Christy's Minstrels. Foster had a ""genteel reluctance to acknowledge these blackface ditties as his own"" and this, combined with his own poor business sense, meant that others pocketed the profits. Even as his tunes were heard internationally, he was going broke, eventually composing in a Bowery barroom and dying a penniless alcoholic at age 37. Although fewer than 30 of the composer's letters survive, Emerson has sought out almost every known Foster fact. He also aims his spotlight at other musical personalities of the period, and provides further illumination of how his songs have been incorporated into popular contemporary melodies--such as Disney's ""Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah"" (Song of the South, 1946) from the chorus of the 1834 blackface song, ""Zip Coon."" The book abounds with such linkages, racial fusions, and present-day cultural reverberations. Emerson's exhaustive research (indicated by an 18-page bibliography) has been meticulously worked into a vivid portrait of 19th-century America. Discography. Photos not seen by PW. (May)