Hard Times Wont Come Again No More Lyrics
New Directions in Music Song Remains the Same Series
by Marshall Bowden
Stephen Foster occupies an uncomfortable infinite in the history of American music. On the 1 hand, Foster was a musical pioneer who made a living from writing songs earlier there existed whatsoever real music industry and who was a pop star in terms of the familiarity of his music to, and its attain amid audiences of the fourth dimension. On the other manus, Foster'southward songs ofttimes glorify life in the antebellum American South and many of them were written for that peculiar American establishment, the minstrel show. As recent events in Virginia demonstrate, blackface is a 'tradition' that has been especially boring to die off.
At that place are indications that Foster's attitudes towards slavery and towards slaves themselves changed in the period immediately preceding and during the Civil State of war too as some documentation to back up the idea that he sought to create songs that addressed African Americans as human beings and to try and agitate some empathy for their plight on the function of listeners. Just it'southward difficult to heed or read the lyrics to the complete "O Susanna" or "Away Down S" without thinking that the man who wrote them was an apologist for something that continues to be a blemish on American history.
Foster spent the primeval part of his career writing songs specifically for minstrel shows. He sold his vocal "Old Folks at Home" to East.P. Christy, leader of the Christy Minstrels, one of the most popular and well known minstrel groups. Christy paid Foster not only for the exclusive rights to use the song, just also to be officially credited as the vocal'south writer.
Minstrelsy was big business, not just for the successful producers and performers in the biggest shows but also for the music business organization. People wanted to sing and play the songs they knew from the shows at abode, and and so publishers such equally Firth and Pond, with whom Foster had a contract, employed some xx men to produce and print sheet music for 200 songs yearly from these shows. In the words of writer Eric Lott in his volume Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Grade, "In this form blackface minstrelsy entered the eye-form parlor." (Lott, page 174)
And so did Stephen Foster. Likewise the "Ethiopian" songs which he wrote for the minstrel shows in a dialect that was meant to mimic that of black American slaves, Foster was likewise able to write the more genteel songs that were performed in the parlors of boilerplate Americans' homes. Blest with the ability to write a memorable tune and a sentimental lyric, Foster scored big with songs like "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair."
In 1855 Foster penned a song that was unique amongst his nerveless work. The song was "Difficult Times Come Again No More", possibly named later the recently published Charles Dickens novel Hard Times. In the song, Foster laments difficult economic times, and the song has a hymn-like quality that suggests non only economic hardships but the physical and spiritual hardships that come with it. In its original arrangement it had the iv role chorus typical of minstrel numbers but it has no dialect and no minstrel themes.
It's a lament and a rallying cry at in one case, unique amidst Foster's oeuvre, and Foster penned its lyrics during a season of loss: a two year period during which his best friend and both of his parents passed away, he separated briefly from his wife, and his career was beginning to sag. His songwriting output diminished and he was forced to draw income against futurity royalties from his music publishers, somewhen selling all rights to his songs outright to settle his debts.
But "Difficult Times Come up Again No More" is like a singular weep of protest from the depths of Foster's soul. The start poetry sets the scene:
Permit united states suspension 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 once more no more.
Followed immediately by the rending chorus:
Tis the song the sigh of the weary; Hard Times, Difficult Times, come once again no more than; Many days you have lingered effectually my cabin door, Oh! Difficult Times, come again no more.
It's a song about poverty–fiscal poverty start and foremost, but it also hints at a poverty of spirit, of general misery. What's refreshing about it, what makes information technology stick in our craw, is its honesty. Information technology doesn't flinch or pull back from showing real human suffering, bringing it to the very entrance to the drawing room: "Let us pause in life's pleasures."
It raises the question of who the intended audition for this vocal was. Information technology'southward not a minstrel song or a plantation song. There is no dialect and the vocalist is non identified every bit existence black. Information technology cuts beyond racial lines and that has long been identified every bit the most dangerous realization that people in a democratic society tin come to: the realization that divisions along racial and ethnic lines are intended to keep people from realizing and voting their true interests.
In 1967-68 Martin Luther King Jr. began to organize the 'Poor People's Entrada' which sought to cut beyond racial lines to unite people of all kinds in holding their government and society to the promise of doing ameliorate for those who were economically disadvantaged. From the ghettos of Chicago to the coal mines of Appalachia, Rex saw the misery of those who had cipher and he knew they had a mutual source: indifference and greed.
In his famous voice communication the night before his assassination, King reminded people of this need for unity:
"You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves go together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves gather, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery."
Then in throwing downward with the poor and the downtrodden of any race or ethnicity, Foster was on the money with "Hard Times Come up Once again No More." But that didn't make the song a success or halt the general slide of Foster'due south songwriting and publishing career.
Yet, the song proved weirdly prescient. Showtime, it presaged much of the suffering of the Civil War, so much then that it is sometimes misidentified as a Civil War vocal. Second, information technology was in many ways the soundtrack of Foster'southward later life in New York City where, despite working industriously on new songs he concluded up in a inexpensive boarding house where he died as a event of injuries from a slip and fall in his room.
"Hard TImes Come up Again No More than" rode quietly into the dusk along with Foster himself. In the stop, the composer was remembered for a handful of songs, some tainted past their minstrel prove origins, and others hopelessly sentimental.
But that'south not how the story of "Difficult Times Come Again No More' ended.
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Source: https://www.newdirectionsinmusic.com/hard-times-come-again-no-more-by-stephen-foster/
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