On today's episode, we’ll hear from Kazuko Miyashita about Stephen Foster’s music in Japan. Kazuko is a Professor Emerita and has published extensively on the influence of Foster’s music in her native country. Due to the time difference, Kazuko recorded a brief summary of her work and shared that with me for the podcast rather than attempting a live interview. Her contribution is highly valued, though, as exploring the influence of Foster’s work outside of the United States is an important frontier in the future of Foster studies.

Continuing with the international theme of this episode, my co-host Jennie will share some of her own experiences with Foster’s music while in China, and tell us some of the context behind “Oh! Oksana,” the Russian language cover of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” that plays at the end of each episode. We’ll end the episode by playing “Oh! Oksana” in full, adapted and performed by Dan Veksler.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

On today's episode, Jason talks with Esther Morgan-Ellis about Foster’s memory in the state of Florida. Esther is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Georgia, but in her travels further south she discovered a unique history of pageantry and music-making at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida. Esther studies and writes about participatory music-making practices of the past and present. In our conversation she offers unique insight into how a chance lyric in a famous Foster song and an apocryphal story about his antebellum travels to the South created an annual singing competition in the mid-twentieth century that still reverberates in Florida today.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

On today's episode, Jason talks with Jennie about her research into Stephen Foster's influence on American popular culture. Jennie is a lyric essayist and scholar of American literature. She has written two books, Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus and Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South. She is also well known to Foster scholars for her 2008 essay “Long Time I Trabble on de Way”: Stephen Foster's Conversion Narrative" published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. I got to talk with Jennie about Foster's connection to pop music icons like Al Jolson and Elvis Presley, and her own unique insight into Foster's struggle with alcohol addiction.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/B/Blood-at-the-Root

https://www.pennpress.org/9781512826685/captive-city/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00152.x

In this episode, Jennie talks with Jason about his research into Stephen Foster and popular music copyright in early America. We also talk about how we got here and reflect on the behind-the-music narrative of Stephen Foster's rise and fall in conversation with pop culture history. Jason is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Clayton State University.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

In this episode, Jason talks with Samantha Ege about the connection between Stephen Foster and William Grant Still. Samantha is a pianist, musicologist, and a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Southhampton. She is a leading scholar of African American composer Florence B. Price, focusing on the Black Chicago Renaissance and Black women’s advocacy networks. She has a celebrated performance career and has received multiple prestigious awards and fellowships for her contributions to musicology. Our conversation covered the complex legacy of Stephen Foster’s songs in African-American musical performance.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: ⁠www.StephenFosterAt200.com⁠.

In this episode, Jason talks with Bill Brooks about the connection between Stephen Foster and Gussie Davis. Bill is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois and at the University of York. He is also Senior Research Fellow and Series Editor at the Orpheus Research Centre in Ghent, Belgium. Bill has published widely in American Musicology and has had a successful composition career. He draws from his experience in both the academic and performance worlds during our conversation.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

In this episode, Jason talks with Candace Bailey about the musical lives of women in nineteenth-century America, and especially about what the binder’s volumes that women in Stephen Foster’s family used to collect sheet music can tell us about his life and legacy. Candace is a musicologist and John C. Neville Distinguished Professor at North Carolina Central University. Her research explores women and music in the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on music in the South. Her extensive publication list includes the books Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriett Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord and Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

In this episode, Jennie talks with Jim Davis, professor of musicology and chair of the music history area at SUNY Fredonia. Jim has written extensively about the music of the Civil War, expanding our conceptions of the fireside music of the front line, the fiddles and fifes of documentaries and films that represent the period. Jim and I have a wide-ranging conversation, not only about the music that Civil War soldiers knew, but also about what the 19th century sounded like. We don't sing on this podcast, but we do visit some familiar tunes from evolutions and adaptations of "Jesus Loves the Little Children" to The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

In this episode, Jason talks with Chris Lynch, about an understudied early Foster composition entitled “Where Is Thy Spirit Mary?” Chris is Head of the Theodore M. Finney Music Library at the University of Pittsburgh and has done extensive work at the Center for American Music helping to preserve and catalog primary sources related to Stephen Foster. He is a music historian with expertise on topics ranging from nineteenth-century popular song to opera and early Black gospel music. His most recent book is Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.

In this episode, Jennie talks with Petra Meyer-Frazier, a musicologist who studies 19th century American music and culture. She teaches at the University of Denver and is the author of the book Bound Music, Unbound Women. Petra studies how women make and curate music, and so we talk about why Foster became the iconic American songwriter, the one 19th century songwriter that everyone remembers. We discuss the classical models he drew from, the popular forms that he adapted for his own uses, and we dwell too with the controversies that have always attended Foster's life and art, from the disreputable blackface stage during his lifetime to the 2017 removal of Foster statues in Pittsburgh.

To learn more about the show and the book, visit our website at: www.StephenFosterAt200.com.