Hard Times Come Again No More: A Song History

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Stephen Foster most likely wrote "Hard Times Come Again No More" late in 1854, during a winter when mill closures left many families in Pittsburgh and Allegheny in real want; Evelyn Foster Morneweck's family history says he saw friends of his own among those hit.[1] Firth, Pond & Co. entered the song for copyright on December 16, 1854, and deposited it on January 17, 1855, one day before Foster's mother died.[1] The University of Pittsburgh's Center for American Music catalogues it as parlor music, and a guitar arrangement followed in 1855.[1] On the music's roots, the Traditional Ballad Index cites a recollection by his brother Morrison that Stephen drew on fragments of melodies he had heard as a boy in an African American church, where the family's nurse used to take him.[2]

Winslow Homer wood engraving of homeless men sleeping crowded together on the floor of a police station

Winslow Homer, Station-House Lodgers, wood engraving, 1874. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The words are a plea for the poor: the singer asks listeners to set aside their pleasures for a moment and share the sorrow of those in want, and each chorus begs hard times to stay away.[2] Because the verses never pin the suffering on any one cause, people have kept returning to the song in bad times of many kinds, from economic slumps and wars to strikes, the civil rights struggle and pandemics.[3] A Civil War parody about army rations, "Hard Crackers Come Again No More," appears in the National Park Service's selection of songs from that war,[4] and the Ballad Index names it among several songs sharing Foster's tune.[2] Mainly Norfolk describes a 1905 Edison cylinder as the song's first recording,[5] and the Ballad Index credits that cylinder to the Edison Quartette.[2]

The folk revival gave the song a second life; by the Ballad Index's reckoning, no Foster song has found more favour with revival singers.[2] Johnny Cash, Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris are among the hundreds of artists who have recorded it, and Dolly Parton's 1980 song "Hush-a-bye Hard Times" grew out of it.[3] It has travelled across the Atlantic too, with recordings by De Dannan on Song for Ireland (1983) and by many British folk singers since.[5] It is also one of the pieces arranged in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[6]

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Sources

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "Hard Times Come Again No More".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Hard Times Come Again No More".
  3. University of Pittsburgh, Voices Across Time: "Hard Times Come Again No More".
  4. National Park Service, Petersburg National Battlefield: "Songs of the Civil War".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "Hard Times Come Again No More [Stephen Collins Foster] (Roud 2659)".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".