This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the interest nor aptitude for business or much else, but he managed to find a niche writing songs, often either for minstrel bands or to be sold as sheet music. “All he had was his ability to create poetry and melody and put them together,” Deane L. Root, a professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. By doing that, he created the model for the professional songwriters who have followed—Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville’s Music Row, and modern-day hitmakers such as Max Martin.The guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster’s music since the early 1990s and even named a group “Beautiful Dreamers” after the Foster composition, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. “It’s just the perfect model for what a melody and the form of a song can be,” he told me. “There’s a million other composers, but just thinking of popular-song form, in a way this seems like ground zero for so much stuff that we have now.” Frisell has recorded “Hard Times” as both a rollicking swing tune and a wistful lament, which he said is a testament to the song’s craftsmanship. “The melody just gets so deep down in you. It’s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of the tree, and then you can start climbing around up there.”Musical skill, then as now, was not enough to guarantee financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a major hit with “Oh! Susanna” in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to earn a consistent living, making $10 to $15 a song—$400 to $500 today. “He didn’t have an agent, he didn’t have a lawyer who could work this for him. He didn’t have somebody who knew the business on his behalf, writing up contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,” Root said. Foster died destitute in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in the bathroom of a hotel on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to legend, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.Foster’s songs became ubiquitous—people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime—and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became best known only after his death, thanks to a fierce reputation-building effort by his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others formed ASCAP, now the leading performance-rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.Speaking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he’d lain awake the night before we spoke, thinking about how difficult it was to discuss. The leading popular music of the era was minstrelsy, which, as the musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, “presented the version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.” White minstrel musicians would either commercialize Black culture (a pattern that persists in popular music) or else perform exaggerated stereotypes of it. Many of Foster’s songs were written for Christy’s Minstrels, a major minstrel troupe of the 1840s and 1850s that performed in blackface, and his lyrics traffic in slurs, pro-Confederate sentiments, and revisionism about the horrors of slavery, even though he’d witnessed it himself. (Foster’s personal politics are tough to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and he seems to have been most interested in getting a paycheck.)“My Old Kentucky Home” is that commonwealth’s state song, and it’s a staple of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass praised the song for awakening abolitionist sentiments. Yet the words also include a slur that was sanitized in 1986—jarringly late. Some of the many Looney Tunes segments that feature his music were later withdrawn from circulation because of their offensive material. But the great Black bass-baritone and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” in its unexpurgated form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.The musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American songs, told me that discussing Foster’s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. “I don’t know if he was any more racist than the average person” of his time, she said. “He was just trying to make a buck.” She finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than who he was as an individual.For a May concert at Carnegie Hall, part of commemorations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, she closed a set with “Hard Times.” Giddens doesn’t perform Foster’s music much, looking to spotlight lesser-known work, but she decided it was the right piece for the moment. For me and for many others, it’s Foster’s finest work. The song is untainted by dialect, with a memorable tune and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a salve during recent hard times. Whatever the flaws of Foster and his music, Giddens said, “The man could write a tune.” When she and her backing group played “Hard Times,” it brought down the house, just as it has done for some 170 years now.Related:Stephen C. Foster and Negro minstrelsy (From 1867)Track of the year: “Hard Times Come Again No More” (From 2016)Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:The capital is a mess.Why everyone is suddenly talking about “universal basic capital”Pete Buttigieg’s ordeal is a frightening new form of political harassment.Today’s NewsRussia hit Kyiv with almost 500 drones in a large-scale attack last night that killed at least 21 people and wounded 85 more, according to the city’s mayor.At least 2,295 people are confirmed to have died in the Venezuelan earthquakes, and nearly 50,000 people remain missing.A U.S. Olympian was indicted for destruction of property after he was arrested for allegedly touching a chunk of detached coating in the Reflecting Pool last month. The Olympian says he did not remove or destroy any of the coating.More From The AtlanticAmerica is having MacBook sticker shock.At least you’re not playing in the World Cup right now.American history as Rorschach testWhat would Mark Twain think of America at 250?Culture BreakIllustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.Debate. A film critic’s new book attacks the medium for diminishing culture. Rarely has David Thomson been more wrong, Michael O’Donnell argues.Investigate. The internet couldn’t get enough of “Freddy,” a German tourist on an epic World Cup road trip, Will Oremus writes. Why did he suddenly go silent?Play our daily crossword.PSThough Foster’s renown grew in the decades after his death, Atlantic readers (then as now) would have been better informed. In 1867, three years after he died, the magazine published a remembrance by Robert P. Nevin, who knew Foster from Pittsburgh. Nevin remembered the songwriter as a melancholic genius, and insisted that Foster did not merely caricature Black Americans but used their vernacular to convey universal themes. “May the time be far in the future ere lips fail to move to its music, or hearts to respond to its influence,” Nevin wrote. That time has not come yet.— DavidStephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.