The song, accompanied by a dance, took the audience by storm, especially when the porter appeared on the stage, half dressed, and demanded his clothes, because the whistle of the steamboat had just blown and the old fellow had to “get back on the job.” So “Daddy” Rice became the father of “Negro Minstrels,” and travelled all over America and even England, singing and dancing negro songs. A few years later Stephen Foster sent his _Oh, Susannah_ to a travelling minstrel troupe, and the song took “like wild fire.” He decided to write songs as a profession, in spite of his family who thought he had wasted time “fooling around” with music, and insisted on his going to work. While _Oh, Susannah_ is a “rollicking jingle,” _Old Uncle Ned_ is the “first of the pathetic negro songs that set Foster apart from his contemporaries and gave him a place in musical history,” says Harold Vincent Milligan. “In this type of song, universal in the appeal of its naïve pathos he has never had an equal.” Another claim he has as a folk song composer, is that he never studied as most people do who want to be composers. He knew very little about harmony and less of counterpoint, and his is “music that has come into existence without the influence of conscious art, as a spontaneous utterance, filled with characteristic expression of the feelings of a people.” (H. E. Krehbiel.) Perhaps he was right when he said that he was afraid that study would rob him of the gift of spontaneous melody that was his to such a marked degree, because he was not naturally a student and might never have carried his studies far enough. At any rate we have every reason to be grateful for the simple direct songs which are dear to us and as near to our hearts as any folk song of any age or country whose author has been forgotten! He was sweet-natured, irresponsible, refined and sensitive, but easily influenced. His publishers made $10,000 out of his songs, but he made little and spent much. He married in 1850, but the union was not happy. During his last years spent in New York, he was poverty-stricken and miserable, and sold his songs, as soon as they were written, for a few dollars in order to live. It seems too bad to have to say that much of his money and his life were squandered thoughtlessly. Curiously enough, his favorite poet was Edgar Allan Poe, whose life resembled his own in many sad details. He loved to go up and down in the Broadway stages, often thinking out his melodies as he rode. This reminds us of Walt Whitman, who rode up and down Fifth Avenue alongside his friend Pete Dooley, the driver of the stage coach! Stephen Foster died in New York in 1864 as the result of an accident in which he had severed an artery. He was saved from burial in Potter’s Field, by the arrival of his brothers and his wife, and he was buried in Pittsburgh beside his parents whom he had immortalized in _The Old Folks at Home_.