Samuel Woodworth

Samuel Woodworth 1784-1842, American author, b. Scituate, Mass. He edited (1823-24) the New York Mirror and was author of the song "The Old Oaken Bucket." His comedy The Forest Rose (1825) was one of the most popular American plays before the Civil War.

Woodworth, Samuel (1785–1842), playwright. The peripatetic editor, publisher, and poet was born into a poor family in Scituate, Massachusetts, and was largely self‐taught. He worked on many popular periodicals in Boston, New Haven, Baltimore, and New York, serving as editor of the New York Mirror in 1823. It was after this stint that he wrote most of his plays: the comic opera The Deed of Gift (1822), Lafayette; or, The Castle of Olmutz (1824), the “pastoral opera” The Forest Rose; or, American Farmers (1825), the melodrama The Widow's Son; or, Which Is the Traitor? (1825, the spectacular thriller The Cannibals; or, The Massacre Islands (1833), and the farce Blue Laws; or, Eighty Years Ago (1833). His last work, The Foundling of the Sea (1833), was written in response to G. H. Hill's search for a play containing a prominent Yankee character. In 1836 Woodworth abandoned all literary interests and went to work for the navy but was paralyzed a year later by a stroke. Except possibly for The Widow's Son there is little of enduring merit in his plays, and posterity will recall him, if at all, as the lyricist of “The Old Oaken Bucket.”

Woodworth, Samuel (1785–1842), Massachusetts‐born author, after 1809 was a journalist in New York, edited the New‐York Mirror and other papers, and wrote plays and poems. He is remembered today for The Old Oaken Bucket, first titled The Bucket, collected in his Melodies, Duets, Songs, and Ballads (1826), and set to music by Frederick Smith. The same volume contains his The Hunters of Kentucky, a ballad written to celebrate the riflemen who under Jackson repulsed the British at New Orleans in 1815. His plays include LaFayette (1824), a melodrama; The Forest Rose (1825), a comedy known for its Yankee character, Jonathan Ploughboy; and The Widow's Son (1825), a domestic tragedy of the Revolutionary period. His sole novel, The Champions of Freedom (2 vols., 1816), is a fantastic moral romance with the War of 1812 as background to a plot involving the spirit of George Washington as a “Mysterious Chief” who guides the destinies of Decatur, Harrison, Jackson, and other heroes of the time.