“Hard Times Come Again No More” is a parlour song by Stephen Foster, published in New York by Firth, Pond & Co. as No. 28 in its series Foster’s Melodies. The publisher entered it for copyright on 16 December 1854 and deposited the finished song on 17 January 1855, the day before Foster’s mother died. Foster was living in the Pittsburgh area, where 1854 brought widespread unemployment and an outbreak of cholera. Evelyn Foster Morneweck, in her chronicle of the Foster family, judged that he probably wrote the song in November or December of 1854. The mills had shut down, she wrote, and he saw many of his own friends among the victims of hard times near his home. Firth, Pond advertised it as “just the song for the times.”
The song asks its listeners to pause amid life’s pleasures, count its many tears and share sorrow with the poor. The chorus calls itself the sigh of the weary, sung to hard times that have lingered many days around the singer’s cabin door. A later verse sets mirth, beauty and bright music against the frail forms waiting at the door. The last verse hears the same plea as a sigh carried across the wave, a wail on the shore and a dirge murmured around the grave. The cause of the hardship is never named.
The song was known in its own day. In August 1855 a writer in Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger called it a “sad plaintive beautiful melody.” Published seven years before the Civil War, it became an expression of wartime hardship, and soldiers circulated a parody about their rations, “Hard Tack Come Again No More.” Foster profited little from that popularity. In 1857, in debt, he sold Firth, Pond all his future rights in the songs they had published, “Hard Times” among them, for $1,872.28. The Edison Male Quartette recorded it on an Edison Gold Moulded cylinder released in 1905.
The Nashville Bluegrass Band recorded it for The Boys Are Back in Town (Sugar Hill, 1990), with Alan O’Bryant singing lead and Pat Enright, Stuart Duncan and Gene Libbea singing tenor, baritone and bass. The year before, Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin had paired it with the fiddle tune “Dusty Miller” on their Rounder album A Song That Will Linger, whose title is a line from the song’s first verse. Emmylou Harris sang it at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on 30 April 1991 for her live album At the Ryman, and Bob Dylan recorded it for Good as I Been to You (1992). James Taylor sang it with Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor on Appalachian Journey (2000), and Mavis Staples recorded it for Beautiful Dreamer (2004). Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band made it part of their 2009 Working on a Dream tour.
