Beautiful Dreamer represents a contemporary anomaly, a tribute album that's not only good but essential. There's no other contemporary album of Stephen Foster songs, even though his music lies at the deepest roots of American vernacular music.
The album honors America's first great professional songwriter with some of the most spectacularly beautiful popular singing I've heard in ages. Raul Malo's rendition of the title track, the most soulful performance he's ever given, sets a high standard at the outset. Many of the seventeen performances which follow are up to that measure, particularly those by Alison Krauss ("Slumber My Darling"), John Prine ("My Old Kentucky Home"), Judith Edelman (a heartbreaking "No One To Love"), Alvin Youngblood Hart (whose "Nelly Was A Lady" is a blues), and above all, Mavis Staples (whose "Hard Times Come Again No More" is gospel at its most prayerful). There are surprises here as well: Who'd have figured Suzy Bogguss for roots music, and who'd have picked "Ah, May The Red Rose Live Always" to show why she belongs?
Foster, a trained musician, was a consummate professional who wrote program songs for minstrel shows and was almost certainly the first American to make a living from songwriting. And yet, "Oh! Susannah" (here in a version by Michelle Shocked and guitarist Pete Anderson) and "Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair" (which Roger McGuinn renders as if it were the ballad accompaniment to the Byrds' take on "Oh! Susannah" from their 1965 album Turn! Turn! Turn!) are among the most important sources of our most self-consciously rootsy expressions today.
The peculiar beauty of Foster's songs derives, in the first place, from their melodic richness. Whatever other passions "Beautiful Dreamer", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Old Folks At Home" (done here by David Ball) and most of his other best-remembered songs express, their core is tunefulness.
Foster also wrote mean rhythm tunes; "Oh! Susannah" and "Camptown Races" (recast by Canadian newcomers the Duhks) survived the blessed death of minstrelsy for good reason. Yet Foster's rhythmic palette may strike contemporary listeners as limited. Whatever the minstrel show picked up of authentically black culture, it wasn't rhythm.
But the melodies, unforgettable as so many are, aren't very complicated either. This quite deliberate simplicity is the key to why Foster's songs survive. They're approachable enough to be sung by everyone, not just professionals, and yet they are sufficiently complex -- melodically, lyrically, and often emotionally -- to draw exceptional performances from the adept. This is what it truly means to make music "for the sake of the song."
Beautiful Dreamer offers something important and currently hidden, in terms both of songs and of sensibility. What Harper's wrote in 1864 still pertains: "The air is full of his melodies...Their simple pathos touches every heart. They are our national music." If we can keep this statement true, we'll be very fortunate.
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