词汇提示

1.minstrel 吟游诗人

2.dialect 方言

3.melodies 旋律

4.folk songs 民歌

5.moderately 适当地

原文

Stephen Foster ? American Songwriter

Before radio and television, movies and recordings, entertainment was often a family or community matter.

Someone in the family could play a musical instrument, or a neighborhood musician would play for small gatherings.

In addition, there would be travelling groups of musicians, actors and clowns who would go from town to town.

In nineteenth century United States, one of the most popular forms of entertainment was the minstrel show.

Black slavery was still permitted in the southern states until 1865.

Even after that date, the lives of many blacks working on large farms or plantations did not change much.

They did hard physical labor in the fields, had little control over their lives, and very little time to relax with their friends.

Foster,who was born in 1826, made this situation the background for many of his songs.

White musicians would try to imagine the feelings of black men and women working on the plantations.

They would write songs in the dialect or speech patterns that they thought black slaves used.

In these songs, the black people would be talking about their hardships, falling in love, playing music and dancing, and finally growing old and dying.

They would play musical instruments, like the banjo, a small four-stringed guitar, which black people played often.

As a small boy, Stephen Foster had sometimes been taken to a black church by his family's black servant, Olivia Pise.

Here he first heard the melodies that inspired his own songs.

Only a couple of Foster's songs are based directly on "Negro spirituals;" but many of his songs have the natural simplicity and emotional power of folk songs.

The youngest member of a large family, Foster showed his musical talent at an early age.

Growing up in an energetic business family Stephen was expected to become a businessman.

And,for a while, he worked as a book keeper.

Foster attended minstrel shows and tried to get the performers to sing his songs.

Sometimes the performers would steal his songs and publish them under their own names.

Copyright laws were weak and rarely enforced,so some music publishers would just go ahead and publish a song without paying the songwriter.

Since Foster hoped to make a living as a songwriter, this was a problem.

Foster's first hit song was "Oh!Susanna" published in 1848.

It became popular with the thousands of men from all over the United States who were heading west to the Californian gold-rush of 1849.

Unfortunately,as an unknown song writer Foster received no money from his early songs.

He seems to have given them out right to the music publishers, just to establish his reputation.

Foster's name, however, was soon widely known,and in 1849 he was able to afford to give up book keeping, and marry the daughter of a Pittsburgh physician.

During the next five years, he earned a moderately good income from songwriting.

In 1851, a daughter Marion was born.

Foster wrote many of his best-known songs at this time - "Old Folks at Home"in 1851;"My Old Kentucky Home" in 1853, and "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" in 1854.

Difficulties in Foster's marriage began fairly soon.