Gentle Annie: A Song History

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Stephen Foster wrote both the words and the music of "Gentle Annie"[1][2], and its title page was deposited for copyright on April 24, 1856, with Firth, Pond & Co. of New York as the original publisher[1]. The Morgan Library holds a first edition, set for voice and piano and bearing the firm's 547 Broadway address[2], and the University of Pittsburgh's Center for American Music lists a guitar-accompanied version the following year[3]. The song is largely a lament for a girl who has died[4], and who she was remains an open question. One tradition points to Annie Jenkins, a grocer's daughter; Foster's niece and family chronicler, Evelyn Foster Morneweck, thought his cousin Annie Evans the likelier subject[1][5]; it has also been said that he had his maternal grandmother, Annie Pratt McGinnis Hart, in mind[4][5]. The Traditional Ballad Index also passes along an account from his brother Morrison tying the song to a little girl who was run down and killed by a dray while out on an errand one stormy night[4].

1850s photograph of a young girl in a long veil with a flower crown, holding a basket of wildflowers

Mark Anthony, Wild Flowers, albumen silver print, ca. 1857. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A photograph from about the time the song was published, shown for atmosphere; it has no connection to the song.

The Ballad Index counts the song among the last successes of his life, though it did little to ease his money troubles[4]. It certainly traveled: the Pittsburgh catalog lists editions from a string of publishers, Metzler and Chappell among them, well into the later nineteenth century, along with reprints in popular songsters[1], and a Glasgow broadside printed by James Lindsay in the 1850s survives in the National Library of Scotland[4]. Baritone Carroll Clark recorded it with banjo for Columbia in New York around 1910[6]. In 1939 the folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded John McCready singing it in Groveland, California, for the WPA California Folk Music Project (now at the Library of Congress), noting that his father had sung it while crossing the plains by ox cart[7].

The song lived on in oral tradition in the American South, southern England and Australia, and a 1931 recording by Asa Martin was issued on Champion in 1933[4]. Its melody also passed to instrumentalists: West Virginia fiddler Oscar Wright had the tune from his mother and was unaware of its origin as a song, and researcher Conor Ward found it in the music manuscript of Francis Reynolds, a County Longford fiddler, dated to about 1883[8]. Australia's own "Gentle Annie" keeps Foster's tune but carries new words credited to Lame Jack Cousens of Springhurst, Victoria; it was printed in Australian Tradition in 1964 and recorded by Martyn Wyndham-Read[5]. The Ballad Index suggests that the New Zealand creek, road and hills named Gentle Annie likely take their name from Foster's song[4].

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Sources

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "Gentle Annie".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum, catalog record: "Gentle Annie: ballad / written and composed by Stephen C. Foster".
  3. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "Foster's Songs, chronological".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Gentle Annie".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "Gentle Annie" (Martyn Wyndham-Read).
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 4443. Gentle Annie / Carroll Clark".
  7. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Gentle Annie" (John A. McCready, 1939).
  8. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Gentle Annie".