The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence happens to also coincide with the 200th birthday of composer Stephen Collins Foster.

A songwriter who achieved remarkable success in the late 1840s and 1850s with “Oh! Susanna,” “My Old Kentucky Home” and many others, Foster was born near Pittsburgh on July 4, 1826.

Though he died destitute in 1864, his memory was revived in the 1890s, when he started variously being referred to as “America’s troubadour,” “America’s folk-song composer” and the “father of American music.”

Today, Foster is the only songwriter of his generation with wide name recognition, which owes as much to his music as to his birthday.

Perhaps the primary force behind reviving his memory was his brother Morrison Foster, who published a biography about him in 1896. Drawing on the defining feature of his brother’s songs – their lack of specificity – as well as his brother’s birthday, Morrison positioned Foster as the “founding father” of a vaguely construed brand of racial and cultural progress.

Ambiguity as strategy

A key to understanding Foster’s initial popularity lies in his lyrics, many of which he deliberately crafted to be open to multiple interpretations.

In the plaintive 1854 ballad “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” Jeanie can be understood as dead or simply absent. Similarly, Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More,” which he also published in 1854, never specifies what kind of hard times the song refers to. It could be the plight of the working class, disease, war, economic panic or anything else.

Foster and his family were northern Democrats. Like most Democrats at the time, they were aligned with the South, opposed to abolition, and believed that states, rather than the federal government, should decide whether to prohibit chattel slavery.

But for most of his career, when he wrote songs that touched on these issues, he chose not to publish........

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