Who was Stephen Collins Foster?
Born on the 4th of July, 1826, Stephen Collins Foster was born (the 9th of 10 children of William and Eliza Foster) at Lawrenceville, East of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From a reasonably well-off middle-class family, he received a private education according to the standards of his day. Although he apparently disliked the normal rote learning and recitations, he was an avid reader, and became a literate, well-educated man. Musically literate from an early age, he probably received some formal musical training from a German immigrant, Henry Kleber, who became well-known as a performer, composer, music merchant, impresario, and teacher, in Pittsburgh. Excepting a few trips to Kentucky, Stephen Foster had never been in the South; his feeling for the plaintive spirit of the negro song possibly began when, as a little boy, he would attend the colored shouting camp meeting with a mulatto maid of the Foster family, to whom Stephen was much devoted. Here, he would have heard, and learned to app
