Beg, borrow, and steal …

… The Con Man Who Invented American Popular Music. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Although he didn’t know much about the American South, Stephen Foster did grasp that the “business of America is business”—even composers needed to respect that fact. In fact, he was a skilled bookkeeper, having worked in that capacity for his brother’s steamship business in Cincinnati. As a professional songwriter, Foster applied this talent to his new craft, tabulating current and anticipated payments from publishers with actuarial precision. His surviving legal contracts are in his own handwriting. In fact, they are the earliest commercial agreements of this sort that we know of in American music. True, Foster died in poverty—with exactly thirty-eight cents in his pocket. Yet, commentators have extrapolated falsely from this sad end. Nothing could be less accurate than the mythic image of Stephen Foster as a careless artist, heedless of his finances and driven solely by his creative, poetic spirit. Foster was as much an entrepreneur as an artist: Long before ASCAP and BMI stepped in to defend the intellectual property of songwriters, he was fighting a lonely and hard battle to ensure proper remuneration for his work.