SERMON: “Some Folks” [italicized text was sung]

Some folks like to sigh [sigh], some folks do, some folks do;

Some folks long to die – but that's not me nor you!

chorus: Long live the merry, merry heart that laughs by night and day,

like the Queen of Mirth, no matter what some folks say!

That song was written by Stephen Foster, America's first professional songwriter. You'll hear it again in a few weeks, because our choir is working on an arrangement of it. And I'm looking forward to hearing it again, because it's one of my very favorite songs. Some folks say that Stephen Foster's music is quaint and outdated. But I think this song shows, more than any other, that Foster was an artist in touch with timeless and universal human themes.

[unsmiling] Some folks fear to smile, [smiling] some folks do, some folks do;

Others laugh through guile [guileful laugh] –

[catching self] but that's not me nor you!

chorus

This song shows Foster as an observer of human foibles that are the same today as they were in his time. Human behavior, human moods, human diversity are the same from generation to generation. What changes is how we perceive our diversity and what we do with it. However much the diversity of human characters may be the same from generation to generation, what changes is our collective character as communities, as a society, as one human race, as we build consensus about what is acceptable and what is not, what is fair and what is unjust, what is right and what is wrong. And in this song, Foster offers us one of the keys to building a world in which what is acceptable to us – by habit and by conventional shared understandings – comes closer to what is fair and what is right. If we can laugh at our foibles, and keep joy in our hearts, we can find the courage and the will to build a better world. Not letting our cares weigh us down, but striving toward a vision, we can bring about the better world we seek.

Some folks get grey hairs, some folks do, some folks do,

Brooding o'er their cares – but that's not me nor you!

chorus

Now, you might be saying to yourself – indeed, you might have said to yourself when you saw the newsletter this month – “Why is our minister going to talk about Stephen Foster? And on the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday?! Is he just indulging his love of history again? Is this just another excuse for him to sing from the pulpit?”

No. Attend.

When Stephen Foster wrote “Some Folks,” he was 29 years old. The year was 1855, and he'd already written most of the songs for which he is remembered: “Oh! Susanna!”, “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks At Home” (better known as “Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.” And by this time he had written all the songs – at least 15 of them – that he wrote in black dialect: the ones with all the “de” 's and “dose” 's, that condescendingly refer to African Americans as “darkies” or in at least one case (in one of Foster's original verses of “Oh! Susanna!”) as “niggers.” That's the Foster we remember. And that's a shame. Because there was so much more to him than that as a person. And there was so much more going on in his music than that, even in his dialect songs.

We've just come through the winter holidays, and I hope that each time you looked at a Christmas tree you remembered that it was the Unitarian minister Charles Follen who introduced the Christmas tree custom to America. And I hope you remembered why he did that. It was to build character in young children – to teach them patience and self-control, to look at all those presents under the tree without opening any before Christmas Day – and also to make Christmas a holiday about home and family instead of revels and mischief. All those wassail songs come from an older Christmas tradition that was more like the Feast of Fools than like the Christmas we know. It used to be that people went wassailing to the homes of the wealthy and powerful, turning the social order on its head, demanding to be served by them for a change, demanding free food and drink, wassail and figgy pudding:

We won't go until we get some, we won't go until we get some,

We won't go until we get some, so bring it right here!

In early America, this tradition had become an excuse for malicious damage and violence – Christmas was a time when it wasn't safe to leave your home, and maybe not even to stay there. When Charles Follen introduced the Christmas tree, he was trying to turn America's culture away from all that.

Something similar was going on in Stephen Foster's music. For wassail, substitute musical shows. For the Christmas tree, substitute parlor music. Parlor music was home entertainment, but it was more than that: it was a mark of refinement. “According to Godey's Lady's Book” – which I gather was meant to advise young unmarried ladies on how to make themselves attractive – “to be seen lugging groceries was unspeakably vulgar, but `[a] roll of music looks so perfectly genteel. It announces that you can not only play, but can also afford to get all the novelties as they appear.'” [cited in PBS's “American Experience: Songs of Stephen Foster”] Foster grew up in Pittsburgh, a major stop on the concert tour circuit, where pianos had been manufactured since 1813, and where there was a symphony orchestra and three musical societies – remarkable for a town in what was then still considered the West. Foster sold his first songs to publishers serving this upscale market.

When he decided to make songwriting his career, though, he sought out performers. Nobody was then devoting full time to writing music as he was to do, and so there was no system of royalties and no songwriters' union. People who wrote songs made money by performing them, and though he was a precocious musical talent as a child, Foster never made a career of performing. He probably gave away his first hit, “Oh! Susanna!” It became popular during the gold rush – its protagonist is a traveler who must look and sound crazy to anyone he meets – and people made up their own verses to it along their way. It was treated like a folk song – no one knew who had written it. Foster saw his market, and his error. When his “Swanee River” was published by the minstrel show manager E. P. Christy as his own, Foster contacted Christy and made a deal to write songs for him (with his own name on them!). Thus he entered the world of professional musical shows.

Christy's Minstrels was a big deal. They enjoyed a seven-year run at New York's Mechanics' Hall, from 1847 until 1854, a record at the time. And it was a groundbreaking minstrel troupe, in that E. P. Christy was trying to elevate what had been bawdy entertainment to something polite middle-class families could enjoy. Sort of like how Vaudeville was a step up from Burlesque. Not a big step. But the sexual innuendo and racial prejudice was considerably toned down. Minstrel shows became popular in the 1830s, when racial tensions were rising in America. It all started as a road show innovation by a New York actor named Thomas Dartmouth Rice, known on stage as “Daddy” Rice. He put on tattered clothes, a woolly wig and smeared burnt cork on his face, and sang a song called “Jump Jim Crow.” That was in 1830. In the next year came the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Nat Turner's slave rebellion. Later that decade came the Amistad trial.

The first minstrel troupe, the Virginia Minstrels, began touring in 1843. Until then, blackface had been a genre of solo acts; now it became an ensemble act. (One of the founders of the Virginia Minstrels, by the way, was a musician named Daniel Emmett, the composer of “Dixie.”) By that time, blackface shows had reached the depths of raunchy and dehumanizing caricature. It was the sort of entertainment that is associated with vice. It was also one of very few places where taboo topics like sex and violence and money and class could be discussed. Christy saw a middle-class market for minstrelsy; Foster sought to join him in elevating popular tastes.

As I said, it was not a big step up. It was still blackface. It was still demeaning. But Foster sought to make it less dehumanizing. And no less a figure than Frederick Douglass understood what he was doing. Douglass said, “It would seem almost absurd to say it, considering the use that has been made of them, that we have allies in the Ethiopian songs [as minstrel music was called] ... `Old Kentucky Home' ... can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish.” Foster's songs portrayed black people in homes, in families, in loving relationships, and as having the same concerns white people would recognize in themselves. Though this does not seem to us like a big step, for pre-Civil War America, it was an important step. The sort of demeaning and racist entertainment that began with “Jump Jim Crow” and grew with the minstrel shows persisted in mainstream popular entertainment until very recent times. “Amos & Andy” was one of the most popular programs on radio – it was blackface without the makeup! – and it even made it to television. That's how intractable prejudice can be. It's no good saying Foster's music “fostered” the prejudice or made it acceptable. What it did, as Frederick Douglass recognized, was to help contain the prejudice by bringing it into conversation with higher values. It helped provide a creative middle ground between silence and violence.

Foster addressed other social ills in his songs in similar ways. Economic injustice, for example:

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears

While we all sup sorrow with the poor:

There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;

Oh! hard times, come again no more.

`Tis the song, the sigh of the weary;

Hard times, hard times, come again no more:

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;

Oh! Hard times, come again no more.

That song was published the same year as “Some Folks,” and qualifies his message about the power of laughter and joy:

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay

There are frail forms fainting at the door:

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard times, come again no more.

Home and happiness are vital to us, and to our less fortunate neighbors as well. Foster seeks to awaken our sympathies.

In 1855, the year these songs were written, Foster was 29 years old. Both his parents died that year. His father was an alcoholic, and that had something to do with both their deaths. Foster's mother died first, of a stroke. She had been the mainstay of the family, holding it together for almost 50 years through many ups and downs and persistent economic hardship. His father had joined a Temperance Society in 1833, but struggled with alcoholism all his life. He was an invalid for about the last four years of his life. Foster himself struggled with alcohol, so the legend goes. The year his parents died he wrote his only temperance song:

Oh! comrades, fill no glass for me to drown my soul in liquid flame,

For if I drank, the toast should be to blighted fortune, health and fame.

I can't help seeing this song, written after his father's death, as his sad reflection on his father's life. Later, with his collaborator, the lyricist George Cooper, he was to write songs depicting the trouble alcoholism brings to marriages. Perhaps Cooper wrote on this topic with a wit Foster found it hard to summon:

My wife is a most knowing woman, she always is finding me out,

She never will hear explanations but instantly puts me to rout,

There's no use to try to deceive her, if out with my friends, night or day,

In the most inconceivable manner, she tells where I've been right away,

She says that I'm “mean” and “inhuman” –

Oh! my wife is a most knowing woman.

There's three more verses of that sort of thing, and then comes the temperance moral of the story:

Yes, I must give all of my friends up if I would live happy and quiet;

One might as well be `neath a tombstone as live in confusion and riot.

This life we all know is a short one,

while some tongues are long, heaven knows,

And a miserable life is a husband's who numbers his wife with his foes.

I'll stay at home now like a true man,

for my wife is a most knowing woman.

Yes, I must give my friends up unless I want to live in confusion and riot – that's a message still given today in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. And it's the truth about alcoholism – it's telling it like it is. It's too easy to wander and to drift if you don't keep good company.

And ultimately that's the story of social and cultural change. Our prejudices die hard. It's too easy to tolerate them in company that doesn't question them, that doesn't even seem averse to them. It takes courage to stand against and apart from conventional ideas and prejudices. It can cost you in all sorts of ways – friends, opportunities, success. And it's hard to have any impact on a whole culture. But it's worth the self-discipline and the perseverence and the personal sacrifices to know that you're standing with higher values and for a greater good. The hardest thing of all is to overcome the prejudices we've been taught – that's why those engaged in anti-oppression work often ask us to acknowledge racism or sexism or homophobia in ourselves.

It was almost impossible for most nineteenth-century white Americans to see African-Americans even as human. It's taken us more than a hundred years for our society to work toward the imperfect state of consciousness about injustice that we have today. And we know we have more work to do. Stephen Foster didn't aim as high as we do when he sought to elevate the minstrel show repertoire and refine popular tastes. And his success at that was limited. But he knew that the way to combat our meanest impulses was to appeal to higher values and to human sympathy, to laugh at our foibles and to keep joy in our hearts so that we can find the courage to meet hardships and our own weaknesses with hope and creativity and a commitment to making a better world.

Long live the merry merry heart that laughs by night and day

Like the Queen of Mirth, no matter what some folks say!

So may it be. Amen.