← New Books Network
New Books Network
Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:01:38
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:00]
Kristen Turner
New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app Based on FICO Score 8 model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [00:28]
Marshall Poe
Experian hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in Podcast Podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:38]
Kristen Turner
Hello, my name is Kristen Turner and this is New Books in Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. My guest today is Christopher lynch, author of Formulating Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. This is an unusual book. Part biography, part source book, part scholarly, the reflection, part reception history, part mythbuster. Born in 1826, Stephen Foster is one of those rare composers whose work has become so embedded in a national culture that his music seems more like folk songs than what they really are. Minstrel and parlor songs that circulated throughout antebellum America via minstrel shows and sheet music. Foster's posthumous reputation eventually far exceeded his popularity. During his lifetime, his lynch divides the book into three sections, which each contain anywhere from 10 to 18 primary sources that provide evidence for how Foster's American reception changed between his death in 1864 and the 1930s. He frames these primary documents with five essays that examine the ever changing myths around Foster, why those myths developed, and how the collecting practices and biases of Foster devotees and his family members influence the national memory about the composer and. And a handful of his most famous songs. Thank you so much for joining me today, Christopher.
- [03:01]
Christopher Lynch
Thanks for having me.
- [03:03]
Kristen Turner
So what drew you to this topic?
- [03:05]
Christopher Lynch
That's a funny question, because I never would have dreamed I would be writing about Stephen Foster. I wrote my dissertation on opera and Broadway. I was always an Americanist, so I was always teaching classes that engaged with Foster's music. But I really was drawn to Foster when I started working in 2018 at the University of Pittsburgh Library System, where the Foster archive is one of the many collections. And I was not hired as an archivist initially. I was not hired even really to work on Foster per se. I was hired because of my music historian's background, and I was writing things for teachers and students about all sorts of archival collections. But the Foster materials really caught my attention. And my office was in the Stephen Foster Memorial Building, and there's a small Foster museum there. And I had always taught the story about Stephen Foster that is still pretty common in textbooks that he had written that he was from a Democratic family, which meant a family that was on the side of the south in some way, at least pro states rights, and that he had somehow evolved away from his family's views and written these songs that were about slavery, but were uplifting and positive forces within the social movements that were happening in his lifetime in the 1850s and 1860s. I'd been teaching that narrative for a long time. And so when I started working in this building in 2018, working with these materials somewhat and just reflecting on the materials and the narrative that I had always thought was true, I started to really sense a disconnection between the two. So the book sort of grew out of that recognition that there were materials in the archive that were telling a different story than the one that I had been telling my students for so many years and that we have all believed for so many years.
- [05:39]
Kristen Turner
As I said in the introduction, I think this is a pretty unusual book. I don't know that I've ever read a book quite like this. Why did you decide to write it in this way? Where you are, you have these essays that kind of bookend the book. And then for each section, and then also a source book. Why do that instead of just a traditional reception history or a biography, you know, you know, some other form of writing.
- [06:07]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, thanks. I. I decided early on in the process that I did not want to write another biography. There are several biographies of Stephen Foster. They all have their pluses and minuses, I would say. But one of the things I really came to see was that sort of the, like, almost literary devices of biography itself were often used to negate certain aspects of Foster's life to paper over them. One very influential book, in my thinking was Mark Evan Bonds's book the Beethoven Syndrome. And he talks a lot about the myths of Beethoven, but how the biographies of Beethoven sort of set a template for musicians. And that template is that there's a small subset of their works, and through those works, we can understand their life, and through their life, we can understand those works. And I came to really see that as being the template that was applied to Stephen Foster, and it was used to tell a certain narrative about his life. There were these four most famous songs of Stephen Foster. They all happened to be sentimental minstrel songs. Old Folks at Home, Masses in the Cold Ground, Old Black Joe and My Old Kentucky Home. They were by far the four most popular songs that Foster wrote. They lived on after his death when most of his other songs faded away. And when people started writing biographies of Foster in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they told his life story through those songs. And they sort of created this circular logic, and they created this myth that Foster was this sort of embodiment of America in that he's this white man writing about the black experience and writing it in this democratic, sympathetic way. And we know that this is true because the songs are sympathetic. And we know that the songs are sympathetic because Foster was sympathetic. So it creates this circular logic that sort of discourages looking outside the songs for any additional evidence. And that's what I really wanted to break up. I didn't want to write a biography that fell into those old biographical tropes. And I really wanted to look outside for different evidence and bring that into the story.
- [08:57]
Kristen Turner
So you went through sort of the basic Foster myth, right, that he was sort of progressive politically and he understood the black experience and all of that. But you. The book itself traces that reception, that sort of ending point where you finally get to this myth that I know, I somehow learned. I don't. You know, you don't know how you learn these. These myths are just around you. But that's Also, what my. My initial impression of Foster as well. You divide that reception into these three chronological periods. Can you tell us a little bit about what those periods are and why you felt like there were these three stages to the myth?
- [09:42]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, definitely. Foster dies in 1864, and the first period really begins right after his death. And what you notice when you read all of these remembrances of Foster from that time period is that there's very little agreement. Maybe we can get into some of those details later, but there is no myth yet about Foster. There are positive stories. There are negative stories. It's really all over the map. The other thing that's sort of key in that time period is that there isn't much memory of Foster really at all. It's one of the reasons why people are disagreeing. Some people are making up stories altogether. But Foster's really fading away from memory. I mentioned those four songs that lived on in this time period. But almost all of his other music was forgotten. And a lot of the time, even his name was stripped off of programs when his music was performed. So even when those four songs were remembered, Foster himself was often forgotten. And time and again, in these remembrances, you come across statements, statements like, you might know the song Old Folks at Home, but did you know its composer was Stephen Foster? So that's sort of the gist of that time period disagreement and forgetting. The next time period really begins around 1890 and goes into the early 20th century. This is when there's a real revival of interest in Foster and just a revival of his memory. It's tied to a few different things, one of which is the fact that his songs begin to enter public domain. And I can't overstate the importance of that. Once people are able to start publishing his songs and featuring them in songbooks in different places, all of a sudden, there's all this literature that starts to emerge about Stephen Foster. Not surprisingly, there's also a lot of interest in Civil War commemoration in the 1890s as well. And Foster certainly gets tied up in all of that. In fact, one of the key figures in Foster memory was his brother, Morrison Foster, who was living in Pittsburgh. And he was on the committee planning the 1894 meeting of the GAR, the Grand army of the Republic. And he envisioned a Foster statue, a Stephen Foster statue. He probably envisioned people singing Foster songs around this statue. Ultimately, the statue itself was delayed. The GAR had its convention, and the statue was. Wasn't unveiled until 1900, but. But it's tied to the Civil War memory, keeping and commemoration. This is also the period where the myth begins to emerge. Morrison is one of the central figures in this, trying to make Foster really seem like a national symbol, the type of figure who links the north and the South. This was also the age of reunification between north and south and healing after the Civil War. So Foster is tied to all of that in this time period as well. The last period I date to 1914 and on in 1914, there is an incident in Boston where a songbook that's used in the public schools and features several of Foster's songs. It uses the N word and other derogatory language in these songs. And directly in this songbook, it was leading to black children being taunted and teased by their white peers. And a group of pastors, parents, and the naacp, in one of their very early efforts, sort of gathered together and petitioned the school board in Boston to revoke this book. And they were successful. What really happened was the myth of Foster that had emerged earlier really took off after this as sort of a rebuttal to the naacp. That language about how Foster's music was national and inclusive and unified all people and appealed across all sorts of boundaries and divides and was universal in its appeal. That language really took off in response to. In reaction against, I should say, to the naacp. And we really see in all the remembrances and other Foster activities, that language of the universalism of his music really taking off in that time period.
- [15:05]
Kristen Turner
You know, that Boston NAACP chapter must have been really active because they did the same thing. They tried to get birth Venetian Band, right around that same time. That would have been 1915. So they were really active here, trying to, I think, not just rebut these bad language, but also the lost cosmic itself. You know, both of these. These ideas are, you know, those songs and that movie which uses those songs in the. And it's the film score, you know, it's all very linked. It's really quite an interesting moment. I think, that you see that group of people really agitating to try to break up that memory.
- [15:53]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I said, Foster was held up from the 1890s on as an embodiment of the reunification of north and South. So that was certainly part of the NAACP's efforts there.
- [16:11]
Kristen Turner
So actually. But that brings up another point. You see the NAACP and lots of other folks pointing out that, you know, these are. These songs, particularly these four songs that you mentioned that are remembered, are supposed to be enslaved people remembering the past. And. And in the two most famous, I think, really old folks at Home in my old Kentucky home. They are remembering family members that they have been separated from and wishing to be back with them. And the language is so ambiguous that actually there are multiple interpretations. And so the naacp, I think, is looking at it as a lost cause interpretation. But that's not the only way to think about it. Can you talk about how these songs have been interpreted differently depending upon the people you're talking about and the political exigencies?
- [17:07]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I actually think in sort of a strange way, what you're describing, the ambiguity of these songs is really where Foster's genius, for lack of a better word, really lay. He was able to write these songs that could mean one thing to one person and something else to somebody else. And I really think he did it deliberately. The song Old Folks at Home is the clearest example of this. The formerly enslaved character in this case is reflecting fondly on his younger days where he was with his family, with his loved ones, his childhood home. But it also contains that line, I'm still longing for the old plantation. And so it just has this sort of open ended question like, well, are you longing for slavery itself or are you longing for your loved ones? And it's not clear in the song. It really is up to the listener to sort of fill in the blanks or decide for themselves. And I really have come to believe that Foster did that deliberately. He had one publisher in the north, another publisher in the South. His songs didn't circulate a lot in his lifetime in the deep south, but in the border states they certainly did. So I think he was trying to have it both ways, trying to have it always. And in a weird way, that's where his genius was, because he was able to do that very, very effectively.
- [18:49]
Kristen Turner
Well, it certainly allowed the music to support whatever myth you wanted to make about him, you know, and also allowed his music to be more popular. And I think that's one of the things that when you're talking about the period of time you're talking about, people did not like to talk about composers as needing to make money and as having sort of commercial impulses. Can you. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the commercial side of this. And you mentioned that it really took off these myths take off when his music's in the public domain. Can you talk about that aspect of it?
- [19:24]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, definitely. You know, you're absolutely right.
- [19:28]
Kristen Turner
We.
- [19:28]
Christopher Lynch
We have a tendency to talk about artists as just. Just pure artists who don't have any worldly concerns or anything. Like that. But of course, they are people who need to make a living. And in Stephen Foster's case, he, unlike all of his peers like Dan Emmett, who was a performer and a songwriter. George Root was a music teacher, music publisher and a songwriter. Foster was just a songwriter. He was not comfortable performing. He didn't make any income from performing. All of his performances were just very small for friends and things like that. He needed to sell songs. All of his income came from his selling of his songs, his sheet music. So I think he really needed to maximize that. And the fact that he had one publisher in the north, one publisher in the South, I think was really formative for him and his songwriting. And he also was guided by his publishers. I refer to one letter in the book that his publishers wrote to him. And encouraged him to write what is most popular. So he was really trying to maximize the popularity of his music. And I really think sort of opening up the meanings of them. Was a key strategy for that. There is, in one of the remembrances, his friend John Mann writes this account of his last years. John Mann and Foster, they were friends in New York City in Foster's last years of his life.
- [21:17]
Kristen Turner
Life.
- [21:17]
Christopher Lynch
And they were very close friends. And John Mann recalls this time when Foster told him about what he was trying to do. When he wrote the song under the Willow She's Sleeping. And it's really, really the only moment that we have in any Foster memory keeping. Where we have any of Foster's own words, of course, in this case told through John Mann. But any of his words about what he was trying to do. And it is a song. It's under the willow She's Sleeping. It's a song that certainly falls into the category that was popular. Of the song of the dead maiden. Or the young woman who has passed too Soon. So we can also think of Jeannie with the light brown hair. People may know Gentle Annie. Other songs by Foster that fall into that category. But the story that Foster told about why he wrote that song. Is so interesting and, I think, so important for understanding what Foster was trying to do in his music. He says that one afternoon he realized he didn't know where his daughter Marian was. And he looked and looked, and he couldn't find her anywhere. And then finally he found her sleeping under a willow tree. And then. And he thought about how beautiful she was. And how glad he was to be to have her and that she was okay. And then he went and wrote that song. Now, according to John Mann, John's wife then said to him What a weird thing then, that you wrote the song as if she was dead. And Foster replied. He said, ah, but this is where the poetry lies. I wrote it so that she could be understood as dead, as asleep, or as both. And I really think that that is a great encapsulation of what he was trying to do, not just in that song, but in so many of his songs. He was writing it to mean this, that the other, everything, whatever. He was opening up the meanings so that. So that they would speak to listeners in different ways. I think there's something really in some cases beautiful and beautiful about that. And in another sense it also helped him, I think, maximize his sales, which he really needed to do.
- [23:54]
Kristen Turner
Well, also interesting in an interesting way where he is trying to make his music universal. And the people that are really propagating this myth sort of more on purpose than just sort of continuing to circulate something that they had heard in the past and that worked for them. They wanted to make it sound universal too. But their idea of universal was very specific, you know what I'm saying? It's very interesting how those two things are in tension with each other.
- [24:25]
Christopher Lynch
Yes. Yeah, that's definitely true. And I think when you rely on especially that subset of Foster songs that are the sentimental minstrel songs, then it's really easy to say that all of these songs were universally appealing. And then it's really easy to construct that meaning, the Beethoven syndrome. Very easy to construct that story about how Foster was just this great person, this sympathetic person, this symbol of democracy. It's easy to construct that off of this subset of songs. But another thing that we see is Foster wrote a lot of songs that he didn't publish and they tend to be very, very different. Those are the intensely partisan songs he wrote, campaign songs that are literally partisan. They're fiercely on the side of the democrats somewhere. If there's any ambiguity in them, it's that their meanings lie somewhere between pro slavery and pro states rights. But it's significantly rightward of the openness of his commercial songs. That's where we get real specific meanings, those, those non commercial songs. And I think that we run into problems when thinking about Foster as the composer of universal songs. He was, he was more than that. He didn't only write these universal songs. He wasn't only those four songs that we tend to think of when we think of Foster.
- [26:09]
Kristen Turner
So you mentioned this remembrance. That is the only time that we have any kind of insight into what Foster might have been thinking when writing his songs. You have about 40 primary sources in this book. How did you pick them out of what I'm sure was hundreds, at least, of documents that might have worked?
- [26:32]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, that's a good question. The goal, I tried to actually include every one that purported to be written by someone who knew Foster. So you're right. There are hundreds of others that are about Foster from these time periods. And some of them are cited, and I refer to them in footnotes and elsewhere, but I didn't include them as primary sources. These are from people who knew or claim to have known Foster. And there are some that seem quite dubious in there as well. But I really wanted to include all of those, even the dubious ones, because I do think when I read other biographies, they tend to pigeonhole Foster or try to really define him very specifically and use that very small idea about Foster to interpret his whole life, to interpret all of his songs. And I think that Foster actually comes more to life for us. This is a more humanizing portrait. To see these accounts that are actually contradictory in some cases, or that some show the positive view of Foster that we're more used to seeing, and some paint a very different light. And I think the complicated and the complicated nature of it and the contradictions actually, in a way, get us closer to probably who the real Foster was. I think biography, again, this is one of the reasons why I chose not to write a biography. I think biography tends to be too narrow in its portrayal of its subject. And I think seeing things and seeing Foster from different angles in some ways gets us closer to who he actually was.
- [28:32]
Kristen Turner
Can you share with us a description of maybe a couple of the primary documents you have in there that you think are particularly important or stand out to you in some way? Just to give listeners a sense of what you're talking about, the kinds of documents you've got in there?
- [28:50]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned John Mann's remembrance, which I think is so central to understanding what Foster was trying to do in his commercial songs. And I think it's important for other reasons, too. It was one of the things that becomes clear when you have all of these remembrances side by side like this in this book, is that you realize that they're responding to each other. At least in some cases, they're responding to each other. And it turns out that man was responding to. Man Wrote his remembrance in 1877, and 10 years earlier, a man named Robert Peebles Nevin had written his own remembrance. That was actually the first real remembrance that was published about Foster. And Mann is really Responding to Nevins, Nevin. Nevins had been essentially plagiarized and republished in 1877. And Mann wrote in to the New York Clipper this. That was the magazine that had published the plagiarized version of Nevin, sort of in response. So it's really a rebuttal of what Nevin had to say. So let me back up and talk about Nevin first. Then I'll talk about how man rebuts some of Nevin's points. Nevin, it turns out, didn't really know Foster all that well. Nevin, they did grow up together. Nevin was a few years older, but Nevin was a Whig and then became a Republican. Foster came from this strong Democratic family. They really weren't in the same social circles, occasionally overlapped. They knew each other, but not well. And we really know that because Nevin wrote to Stephen Foster's brother Morrison, right after the composer died and asked him for details and stories and information. And all of that found its way into Nevin's article. And Morrison was always into making the family look really good, making his brother look really good, inflating things, leaving certain things out. And he did that in his response to Nevin. And a lot of that found its way into. Into Nevin's article. So, for example, Morrison really outright lied to Nevin about how much money Stephen Foster earned first from selling the rights to the minstrel Edwin Christie, who was the first to perform Old Folks at Home. Morrison says that Christie paid Foster $500 for that, which was a ton of money back then, and Nevin reprints that. And that sort of became a standard narrative. Well, when man reads that in the ten years later in the plagiarized article, one of the things that man writes back is that that's just simply not true at all. That Foster had told him that he had made $15 from Christie, which there's a big difference between $15 in 1851 and $500 at that time. And not only that, according to Mann, Foster had earned about a total of fifteen hundred dollars from old folks at home, not the thousands of dollars. And this is all backed up then by Foster's own account books that survive in the Foster archive. So we see here this sort of dialogue. We can see literally, Morrison exaggerating things, Nevin putting that into his article innocently, not knowing that it's not true, but then it sort of taking on a life of its own. And then man saying, no, no, no, this isn't true here. And there were some other Examples, too. Morrison encouraged Nevin to write about how Foster had relationships with famous celebrities like Washington Irving. But in truth, according to Mann, at least, this wasn't true at all, that they didn't have a relationship. There was one time where Washington Irving wrote a letter to Foster expressing interest in purchasing something from him, but that was the extent of it. So there are sorts of exaggerations that become clear in the. When you understand that man is responding directly to Nevin, you can see these stories being exaggerated and then rebutted.
- [33:43]
Kristen Turner
I think that's one of the things that's fascinating about this work that you've done, is that you are able to show sometimes where those myths started. Like, here's the first time somebody said this, and then also why they said it. And often the reason was trying to smooth out the edges of who Foster really was or to hide things that the Foster family found embarrassing or that they didn't want other people to know. And sort of the person that also contributed to that the most, I think, is Josiah Lilly. And I would love for you to talk about him a bit and how he is part of how those memories of Foster, especially in those later periods when you're getting, you know, post 1914, how he is involved in all of this.
- [34:39]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, so Josiah Lilly was the son of Eli Lilly, and He was the second president of the Lilly Pharmaceutical Company. And when he retired right around 1930, he was looking for a retirement hobby, and he wanted to build a collection for a founding father. And he was initially interested in Benjamin Franklin, and then he discovered that really it had already been done. And so he was looking for an alternative founding father. And who he settled on was Stephen Foster, who he felt he could establish as a musical founding father, an American cultural founding father. And that's really what he set out to do. Now, of course, he wasn't the first to come up with that idea. It never really was true, of course, but it had been put out by Morrison and other people starting in the 1890s and took off from there. So. So Lilly, I think, truly believed that Foster was a founding father. And then everywhere he looked, at least initially, he found confirmation of that. I mean, this is a great example of confirmation bias. So one of the first things he finds is Morrison's own remembrance. We've already talked about how Morrison left some things out and exaggerated others and really became one of the first major proponents of the myth of Foster. But to Lilly, in 1930, this becomes sort of foundational for him. This is seen as sort of proof, like oh, his own brother said this. He's not aware of the history of how Foster had been remembered. And then he also finds a biography by a man named Harold Vincent Milligan. His biography had come out in 1920, and that was really directly written in response to the NAACP 1914 protests. In fact, Milligan even writes about it in the book and includes his own rebuttal to that. And not surprisingly, he says basically that the NAACP got it wrong. The Foster songs are universal, and they're not about these specific racial things that the NAACP is complaining about. So, you know, Lilly sees that, though, and again, that's just more confirmation of what he already believes is true. And so he really sets out to build an archive, what he calls an archive. It's really a collection that proves and that establishes Stephen Foster as a founding father of American music. And, I mean, there's so much here about the choices that he and his staff made about what to collect and not to collect. Some of it becomes clear in my book, if you work through it from beginning to end, I usually note what found its way into the Foster archive and what didn't. And you won't be surprised to hear that all of the remembrances that have more negative portrayals of him or that portray his. His drinking or that really portray his close relationship with minstrelsy, with racism, with the politics, with the democratic politics of his day, those remembrances are simply not included in the archive. There's also no archiving. They hired a press service, a clipping service, to essentially find almost every article ever written about Stephen Foster, except they never clip. Keep a single clipping from anything in the black press. And, you know, these choices are. It's hard to know what was conscious and what wasn't, but these choices had real effects, and they were certainly trying to portray Foster as the father of American music, and these choices helped them do that. In addition to things that they didn't keep in the archive, there were times when things did find their way into the archive, and they simply chose not to describe them in their card catalog or other discovery tools that are used. So they were essentially. Essentially hidden away, buried in this vast archive of materials. These are materials pertaining to people that the Foster family, Foster's parents, enslaved, other racial issues as well, all sort of hidden away, out of sight.
- [39:55]
Kristen Turner
One reason that you know now about some of this hiding of certain things and how Foster's descendants really had very strong opinions about how Foster should be remembered and what material they were willing to give to Lillian and not was because there's this letter by John Tasker Howard, who was hired by. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he was hired by Lilly to write a biography of Foster. And so they were all working closely together, Foster's family, Lily and Howard, to kind of both create the archive and also this biography. And later Howard writes basically a memoir about that experience which his daughter gives to the Foster archive in, in the 90s. Can you tell us more about that and what that tells you and to understand?
- [40:54]
Christopher Lynch
Oh, it's an amazing document. Difficult to read in that. It's really. It's like a whistleblower account, essentially. So as you said, Lilly hired Howard to write this biography and it was supposed to be the authoritative biography of Stephen Foster, the first one to make use of this great new archive. And I would say it, I actually think it still is in many ways it really is a very good biography. I would tell everybody who reads it today though, to just be aware that there's a lot that isn't in it. But I think that, you know, what is in it is very good. There's a lot that has been cut and it did. It certainly proved to be a very difficult process for Howard because there was a lot that he wanted to include, but he wasn't allowed to, either by Lilly himself or by Stephen Foster's descendants. Evelyn Foster Mornwick, primary among those people. She really had most of the Foster family documents in her possession and was able to control, you know, what Lilly had access or, excuse me, what Howard had access to. So in this, this sort of tell all account that was never published, but exists in manuscript on the shelf now in the archive in this account he talks about how he noticed, for example, a discrepancy with the eldest foster child, Stephen Foster's eldest sibling, William Foster Jr. He noticed just discrepancies in birth dates. And when he, when he asked about it, he discovered that the Fosters had had a child named William around 1808 and that that child died. But then that sometime a few years later another child who Stephen Foster's father had outside of his marriage was sort of brought into the family and took on the name William. They did not allow John Tasker Howard to write about this. John Tasker Howard described him as a relative, the son, as a relative of Williams that came to live with the family. And that's just one example. That's really all that we know. To me, I find it a very curious fact. Right around that same time, the Fosters also were owned, enslaved. A young girl named Olivia who was of mixed race, meaning her father was white. And I find it very curious. It seems like it's certainly within the realm of possibility that the same was true of William, and that William, this son, passed for white throughout his life. And that, in fact, was what they were trying to cover up. Now, this could be a fanciful theory that I have, and it could be not true at all. But what's really disappointing is that the omission of certain documents from the archive, the lack of clarity and openness, it doesn't allow us now to disprove this theory if it is, in fact, not true. And so it just has to be part of the possibilities that is possible for this. And, you know, so Howard wasn't allowed to write about that at all. There's lack of clarity around that. Evelyn Foster Mornwick also withheld letters that she said really explained the last years of Stephen Foster's life. And to this day, those letters still don't appear to have ever found their way into the archive. And so, unfortunately, again, we lack that clarity about the end of his life. So there were certain things that the family was just concealing. There's one letter where Evelyn writes that she didn't want anything embarrassing about the family getting out either, the family of the past, and that also some of these people had descendants who were still business people and respectable people. She didn't want anything embarrassing coming out about anybody, any of these other families who were linked to the Fosters in the past either. So it's all. It's shrouded in secrecy. Howard was controlled, was limited, and he wrote about the control still didn't include a lot of the details, unfortunately. But he wrote about how he was controlled and the narrative was manipulated. So we at least know that it was manipulated.
- [46:11]
Kristen Turner
Yeah, you wonder what he didn't write. I mean, this. A lot of what you're talking about is this idea of the archival silence and, you know, omissions that must have been on purpose, like not having anything about the 1914 NAACP challenge, not anything from a black newspaper. You know, some of that has to be on purpose. Like, it had to have come to them, and they just. They just didn't keep it. Right. And obviously, on the family's part, just choosing which letters to give over and whatnot. And those create these archival silences. And I really think before the advent of newspaper databases, that was particularly effective in terms of keeping scholars from knowing what was happening in the press, because you can't read every newspaper in the country, and you really have to depend on these clipping files, which are for people who don't go into archives. Every archive has extensive clipping files of press coverage of, you know, depending on the size of the archive, it could be thousands of people. And if you don't have any other way to check it, then that's all you have. And it can really change what you think about a person if all you have is what happens to be in these clipping files. And today we do have much better access to that kind of coverage.
- [47:33]
Christopher Lynch
That's right. And I mean, I thought about that a lot as I was working on this project, because that's what I relied on to find a lot of these other things that were left out of the archive. I used these electronic resources to find all of these other things that helped fill out the story and really highlight these omissions and silences in the archive. And, you know, as a. As a librarian, somebody who makes the materials in the archive available to people, in addition to being a researcher who has used that archive. You know, you walk into that archive and you see these thousands of clippings and you just think, wow, this is. This is everything. It's real easy to sort of fall into that. That trap. But I probably, in so many cases, certainly in the case of the Foster archive, it's not true. And there were, again, it's tough to know exactly what was deliberate and what was not. But at least in some cases, some of this had to be deliberate choices that were made to conceal certain things about Stephen Foster.
- [48:47]
Kristen Turner
So, of course, one of the big hot button issues is, you know, what did Foster really feel about enslavement? And you have revealed that he did come from a slaveholding family, which is something that was not widely known, you know, for. Until you talk about it, I think, really. So these are huge revelations. But honestly, because we don't have that much time left, I definitely should read the book. But one of the things that I thought was interesting about it was there is there's a persistent rumor that Stephen Foster was queer. And I wanted to bring that out. One, because it's not as well known as some of the other things that might have been covered up about him. That he's an alcoholic, that he, you know, that he does. Was a strong Democrat, that kind of thing. But also because I think you point out, you know, it's very seductive in 2026 to hope that he was queer. Right. Just in the way that it was so seductive in 1930. Say he was progressive on race. Right. And to hide that he came. Comes from a slaveholding family. So can you talk a little bit about. About this issue? You know, what do we know that might indicate that he was or was not queer? But also how this tells us a little bit about the perils of being a historian.
- [50:11]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, well, you know, I. His. His sexuality has been a topic of discussion for a long time. And I was really hoping to discover a remembrance of Stephen Foster that had been previously unknown or long forgotten that really shed light on this. And unfortunately I did not. But what I do point to are some. What I think. Well, let me start by talking about some of the evidence that people have pointed to in the past. He is known to have been estranged from his wife on a couple of different occasions. He is also said to have not played sports as a boy. He's said to have been a little bit aloof. And you know, some of these using this as evidence is a little uncomfortable. It relies on uncomfortable stereotypes, perhaps of sexuality or something, but that's about it. In terms of evidence from his lifetime or from what people have said about him. In other words, there really isn't much evidence at all, any evidence, really. And I didn't find the remembrance that conclusively tells us one way or the other or what his situation was. But I do point out that there are some very strange things, strange word choices, I should say, that John Tasker Howard makes in his biography where he refers to Foster loving his wife as much as a man like him was able to and things like that. On a couple of occasions in the biography, he has some wordings like that that seem to just sort of. It makes me wonder, did he know something that he wasn't allowed to write? And we do know, of course, that Morne Wick was putting her foot down and Lilly as well, not allowing certain things to be written about. And so I think, you know, like the possibility that his brother was of mixed race and passed as white his whole life. This is another thing that has to just be accepted as a possibility. And I think we would be wrong to assume heteronormativity. I think we'd be wrong to assume that he was queer. There isn't strong evidence in any direction. Really, the best evidence of any is that are those strange wordings by John Tasker Howard. And you ask about the perils of us as historians of writing about a subject like Stephen Foster. And I think it's another trap to fall into that biographers often do is to try to pin down their subject. This is who he was. This is what he believed. I think we get closer to. To the real Stephen Foster by reading all of these contradictory reports of his life. I think Foster probably changed a lot throughout his life. Probably changed depending on the person he was talking to. I think we get closer to the real Foster when we embrace the conflicts and the contradictions. And that's one thing that I hope that this book achieves.
- [53:54]
Kristen Turner
Well, I think you. Yes, I agree with that. And I. I think that you get at how various people, various historians who've looked at Foster, they make inter. It. It lays bare the interpretations that historians must make. Like you, you have to interpret documents, you. You have to choose what you believe and what you don't believe. You know, who did this person really know, Foster or not? Right. You know, you have to make these analyses, you have to decide things, but also how easy it is. When we look back, it's much easier to see how historians were also being influenced by the context of their times. Like what are the political exigencies, what are the cultural exigencies of their time? And just as there's strong, I don't know what's a good word, strong reasons that a historian in the 30s or the 40s might want to think of Foster as a patriotic national figure, you know, in the run up to the war, in, you know, the. An age of segregation, like all of those things, you can see how it would make historian want to believe that. I think you see, in the gay story, there might. There. There are people that want him to be queer because we want. We want to be able to talk about historical figures who have been oppressed in that way. And, you know, what would it be like to be a closeted Stephen Foster? Right. How does that change our perception of him? But as you say, you can't go down that rabbit hole for too long or else you run so far ahead of your sources that you've sort of lost objectivity.
- [55:38]
Christopher Lynch
Yeah, that's right. One of the things I argue for in the book is that it's perfectly fine to, as a historian, write about a range of possibilities or a range of Stephen Foster's. Again, I suspect he, you know, he changed throughout his life. He changed in different situations. There were different versions of Stephen Foster at all times. And I think we run into trouble when we oftentimes because of what we want ourselves. We sort of project that onto Stephen Foster as the image of Stephen Foster, that is who he was. In the example of Foster's writing patriotic or universal songs, perhaps sometimes he did, he did a lot more than that too. And I think we do really foster in history an injustice ultimately when we look at it too narrowly.
- [56:39]
Kristen Turner
Well, this is a fantastic book and I hope many of our listeners will go out and read the whole thing and see how much richer it can be that it is than we can even talk about talk about today. You finished this long term project. What are you working on now?
- [56:53]
Christopher Lynch
Well, a couple of other Foster related projects. This is a big foster year. His 200th birthday is coming up on the 4th of July. We had mentioned he was born on the Fourth of July. So July 4, 2026, will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the 200th birthday of Stephen Foster. So there's a lot of Foster stuff going on right now. There's a book that's in the works, a collection of essays edited by Jason Guthrie and Jenny Lightweiss Gough. And I have one essay coming out in that and I have another essay coming out in a hopefully coming out in a special issue of a journal on Stephen Foster. These are sort of little things that didn't quite make it into the book. One really looking at the idea of Foster as a folk composer or a composer of folk music. Then the other big thing that I have is I'm working on a critical edition of the music of an underappreciated but really historically significant black gospel composer named Charles Henry Pace, who started in Chicago in the 1920s working alongside Thomas Dorsey and then then moved here to where I live now, Pittsburgh, and had a decades long career composing and publishing gospel music here.
- [58:25]
Kristen Turner
Well, both those projects sound exciting and. Or all three, I guess. And also so musicological, where we never really stick to one thing, do we? Like now you're doing gospel music before you were doing Foster. Right. So many musicologists are all over the place. Yeah, are all over the place when you compare it to other disciplines where, you know, every book is about the same 10 years. So I look forward to seeing those projects as they come out and come to fruition. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Kristin Turner. This is New Books and Music, a podcast of the New Books Network. And I've been talking to Christopher lynch, author of Formula Emulating Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Thank you.
- [59:13]
Christopher Lynch
Thanks for having.