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Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster; The Unbroken Circle: The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family
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When Stephen Foster died 140 years ago, one of pop music's first statistics -- booze and economic foolishness combining to drop him in a Bowery flophouse -- he wasn't just the greatest American songwriter of that century. He was, arguably, the first truly "pop" American songwriter. Pop, that is, in the sense of a synthesis of America's disparate and often opposing cultural tattoos: African musical tradition and contemporary racist minstrelsy; Brit-originated trad-song nativism and Italian and...
