Various Artists
Beautiful Dreamer the Songs of Stephen Foster
American Roots Publishing
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Good
morning, America! This is the morning after the great divide,
the day when one (wo)man's dream became the other (wo)man's nightmare
or so it seems. What could be more welcome and comforting right
now than an album with songs more than a hundred years old, written
by a man who was born the day the nation celebrated its fiftieth
birthday. A man who became America's first professional fulltime
songwriter and left hundreds of songs behind, many of which are
still popular, even outside the United States of America. Songs
like "Oh! Susanna," "The Camptown Races,"
"Swanee River," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Hard
Times Come Again No More" - in recent years revived by Emmylou
Harris - or "Beautiful Dreamer." The latter was chosen
as title song for this remarkable project of American Roots Publishing,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving American regional
culture through literature and art. Founded by Nashville music
journalist Tamara Saviano, its advisory board comprises people
as diverse as Emmylou Harris and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Beautiful Dreamer is ARP's first project as well as the
first release for new label Emergent Music.
Some of the featured songs sound as if they have always existed,
others as if they have been written only yesterday. Some sound
pretty and innocent like parlor music, others tragic and bittersweet
like real folksongs. The tragic genius behind all these songs
was a man from Pittsburgh who used to work as an accountant on
the banks of the Ohio in Cincinnati. His name: Stephen Collins
Foster.
As a teenager, Foster got involved in minstrel music, the
"rowdy, racist and first uniquely American form of popular
entertainment" (liner notes). In later years, he replaced
what he himself called "trashy and really offensive words"
and chose for a more respectful approach, as is demonstrated
in "Nelly was a Lady," which made him the first white
songwriter calling a black woman a lady.
What made him the first distinctively American songwriter
was his openness to all sources of music that had arrived in
America through European settlers and African slaves, and his
unique ability to meld them into something new. It made him a
pop star a century before that term was invented. However, it
did not earn him fame and fortune and like with many modern day
pop stars, his personal life was a mess.
After he moved to New York in 1860, his luck was running out.
His marriage with Jane Mc Dowell ("Jeannie with the Light
Brown Hair") fell apart and his music was no longer needed
as the spook of the Civil War started raising its ugly head.
>On Beautiful Dreamer we find 18 of Foster's compositions,
all interpreted by different artists. The ball is opened by Maverick
Raul Malo who gives "Beautiful Dreamer" the flair it
deserves. It's a long way from big Raul's rich vocal performance
to the subdued interpretation of the lullaby "Slumber My
Darling" by Alison Krauss, Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor and
classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and back to BR5-49's hilarious take
on the cock-fighting song "Don't Bet Money on the Shanghai."
The diversity of Foster's songwriting continues to amaze.
African American blues musician Alvin Youngblood Heart turns
"Nelly was a Lady" inside out. He sounds so much like
a heart-broken black knight in rusty armor mourning his "dark
Virginny bride" with such intense sadness that he almost
makes it impossible for other artists to follow Stephen Foster's
ghosts in the footsteps he left behind.
However, bluegrass artist Judith Edelman succeeds in doing
just that without any apparent effort. Accompanying herself on
piano, she cuts to the bones of "No One to Love" as
neatly as surgeon with a scalpel. The "Campdown Races"
is one of these songs which has been played around the camp fire
so often that one tends to not want to hear it anymore, but the
sensational young folk band the Duhks from Winnipeg, Manitoba
pull it out from under the campfire ashes and make it rise like
a calypso- dancing phoenix.
Another Foster "hit" is "My Old Kentucky Home,
Goodnight," but John Prine makes it sound as if it has just
flown out of his own pen. Henry Kaiser's interpretation of the
instrumental "Autumn Waltz" is awesome. The tune is
played on an assortment of folk instruments from Iran and Iraq
with an electric guitar cutting right through it. You have to
hear it to believe it!
Not all artists are that adventurous. Beth Nielsen Chapman
keeps it traditional with her rendition of "In the Eye Abides
the Heart," and Nashville star Suzy Boguss demonstrates
with "Ah, May the Red Rose Live" that she can do anything
with her voice once she chooses the right material. Not all contributions
are equally convincing. David Ball's jazzy "Old Folks at
Home (Swanee River)" gets a bit sugary at the end due to
a slightly overdone string arrangement. I'm not sure what to
do with Michelle Shocked's and Pete Anderson's version of "Oh!
Susanna" that keeps stumbling between so many different
musical styles that it makes me feel a bit giddy and Grey DeLisle's
whispery "Willie We Have Missed You" suffers from acute
vocal over-acting.
It's Mavis Staples, accompanied by Buddy Miller, Steve Fishell
and Matt Rollings, who firmly guides the project back to its
exceptional level. Her gospel rendition of "Hard Time Come
Again No More" is memorable. So is the soulful treatment
of "Gentle Annie" by one of the most astonishing young
bands that saw the light this year, Ollabelle.
Playing his trademark the 12-string-Rickenbacher, Roger McGuinn
does an incredibly smooth and moving "Jeannie with the Light
Brown Hair," nearly forty years after the Byrds recorded
another Foster-song, "Oh! Susanna," for their album
Turn! Turn! Turn!
Canadian songsmith Ron Sexsmith gently closes the door on
Foster with "Comrades Fill No Glass for Me." His slightly
off-key vocal rendition with sober piano accompaniment is rightly
unsettling.
Oh! Comrades, fill no glass for me
To drown my soul in liquid fame.
For if I drank, the toast should be
To blightened fortune health and fame
Yet, though I long to quell the strife,
That passion holds against my life.
"Comrades Fill No Glass for Me", 1855
The song wraps up Foster's tragic life pretty well. Wrestling
with alcoholism and poverty, Stephen Foster, the genius American
songwriter, died gashing his throat in a fall. He was 37 years
old and had 38 cents in his pocket. The Civil war had been raging
for three years.
www.americanrootspublishing.org
www.sonic.nl (Europe)
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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