#294 The Stephen Foster Story w/ Richard Blanton, Donna Phillips & Johnny Warren
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Foster was America's first great published musician. He wrote some of America's great folk songs, including "Oh, Suzanna," "Camptown Races" and "Hard Times Come Again No More," and his music was the inspiration for Paul Green's play "The Stephen Foster Story," which is performed every summer in Bardstown, Kentucky. In this episode we speak with two of the artists involved in that play- Donna Phillips and Johnny Warren- as well as My Kentucky Old Kentucky Home State Park Mansion Supervisor, Richard Blanton, to learn more about Foster's life, their work in preserving his memory, and how it all can help us understand our past.
If you're traveling through Kentucky, make sure to check out dates for "The Stephen Foster Story" and visit My Old Kentucky Home Mansion!
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:05.4 | And this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:07.2 | That's right. And today, the road takes us to our old Kentucky home, Bob. |
| 0:12.3 | Yes. My old Kentucky home, which is an outdoor summer theater performance that takes place every year, I think every year since for 65 |
| 0:26.9 | years. Is that true? 65 years. In Bardstown, Kentucky, beautiful, lovely historic Bardstown, |
| 0:35.5 | Kentucky. The show, my old Kentucky home, is about Stephen Foster. And Ben, |
| 0:42.1 | I am fascinated by Stephen Foster. He is arguably or definitively, depending who you ask, |
| 0:50.6 | the first American songwriter. You know, Bob, of course, I knew who he was, right? He's written |
| 0:55.0 | all these famous songs, Camptown Races, you know, my old Kentucky home. What I didn't realize |
| 1:00.0 | until we booked this episode was how short his life was. Incredibly short. Horribly short. |
| 1:07.9 | I mean, beautiful dreamer. I dream of Jeie. You know, like, you know these songs. |
| 1:14.2 | If you grew up 52, I grew up watching Bugs Bunny. That's where you learn Stephen Foster. |
| 1:21.6 | And there's reasons for that, which we may have time to get into. We may not. But these songs |
| 1:27.4 | are part of the DNA. And if you like the |
| 1:31.1 | Avet Brothers, or if you like Brandy Carlisle or any Bob Dylan, I mean, anywhere, you have to think |
| 1:37.9 | that all of American popular song comes back to Stephen Foster in some way. |
| 1:45.4 | That's right. |
| 1:46.0 | And he was, and he was a transformational figure, not only that he starts out as a minstrel |
| 1:53.6 | songwriter, but then he breaks out of that into parlor music. |
| 1:57.4 | So we're going to get into that. |
| 1:58.7 | But first, I want to talk about the actual outdoor |
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