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| | Alexander Reinagle was born into a musical Austrian family and studied in Edinburgh and London before arriving in New York early in 1796. A true classicist and devotee of Bach and Haydn, Reinagle wrote four sonatas during his life in America, but he composed patriotic music as well, such as America, Commerce, & Freedom, shown at left. | In 1823, Sir Henry Bishop, one of the conductors of the London Philharmonic Symphony, composed an opera called Clari, the Maid of Milan, into which he introduced his previously written Sicilian Air. John Howard Paine wrote the opera’s libretto, including a set of verses for the air, which began “Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam. . . .” Thus the combination of a lilting melody and a heartwarming poem resulted in one of America’s best-loved songs, Home, Sweet Home. | Soon there were as many American songs being published as there were English ones being reprinted. Some of these American songs retained a patriotic flavor, but after the War of 1812, practically no more patriotic music was written in America until the War with Mexico in 1847. Instead, popular songs were produced, and the first one, written in 1826, was The Minstrel’s Return from the War, by John H. Hewitt.
|  | For several years, starting in the late 1820s, individual performers on the stage had at times blackened their faces with cork and sung comic songs in dialect. Two of the most popular were Zip Coon, which later became known as Turkey in the Straw, and The Blue-Tail Fly or Jimmy Crack Corn. In the 1840s and 1850s, several dozen minstrel shows toured the United States singing comic songs with black dialect interspersed with a few sentimental numbers to give the show variety. Possibly the best-known of the groups was The Christy Minstrels,’who attracted writers of popular music to supply them with their material. Stephen Foster’s song, Old Folks at Home was introduced by The Christy Minstrels, who bought the rights to the song for $15.
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