Stephen Foster

In the spring of 1853 Stephen Foster's wife, Jane, left him. Soon after that, he left Pittsburgh to try his fortune in New York. It is clear that this song reflects his sense of loss. His nickname for Jane was "Jennie," and an early version of the song has the lines, "I long for Jennie but her form lies low." The imagery of this draft (some of it written with harsh, slashing downstrokes) continues to evoke death: here her fingers are "snowy" (i.e., marked with death's pallor) not "gentle," as in the final version of the song. In the end he transformed the song to one about a living beloved who is absent and deeply missed. There is still a bit of ghost-like imagery, as she is twice likened to a "vapor" in the "summer air." The verse in which Foster says he hears her melodies "sighing round my heart," seems to promote her to the position of his absent muse. Extraordinary touches in the melody are worth noting: the wide leap of a ninth from a C to the D more than an octave above, only to fall back to the octave, making a powerful impression of a leap of passion that overshoots it bounds, and the general superimposition of a pentatonic profile onto an ordinary tonic-dominant structure.

Incidentally, "Jeanie" was not popular in its time. Correctly noting that in this song Foster had written a tune that was "decidedly not a negro melody," a review in the New York Herald went on to say, "The music is very clever, but the least said about the words, the better for the poet." The song was popularized in the 1930s by Al Jolson and tenor John McCormack, used in the popular movie Swanee River (a fictionalized biography of the composer), and played on the radio so often that it finally became a hit during a period when ASCAP was feuding with the radio networks.