“Hard Times Come Again No More” is a parlour song by Stephen Foster, published in New York by Firth, Pond & Co. in 1854 (copyright registered December 16, 1854; full deposit January 17, 1855). Foster wrote it during a period of severe distress in his home of Allegheny City and Pittsburgh: unprecedented unemployment that spring, four hundred cholera deaths in two weeks that summer. Firth, Pond’s own advertising for the song read “Just the song for the times!”
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 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.
