Hard Times (Come Again No More)

The melody is generally understood to draw on a tune Foster heard as a child at a church in the African-American community in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania — one of several pieces in Foster’s catalogue that lean on the Black sacred and secular music he encountered in the Pittsburgh area. The four-part choral chorus and the absence of dialect put the song outside Foster’s minstrel work and into the parlour-song repertoire he was developing in his last years.

It became a Civil War-era expression of suffering and remains the most-recorded Stephen Foster song. The Nashville Bluegrass Band’s 1990 reading — the version associated with this entry — is one of the more frequently cited modern bluegrass cuts; Mavis Staples, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, and dozens of others have recorded the song since the 1990s. It works as a slow vocal feature in any acoustic-roots set and remains one of the most-covered American songs of the 19th century.