Free Stephen Foster sheet music
8 Stephen Foster scores on Artform's shelf, ordered easiest to read first. Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep.
Open the sheet music libraryStephen Foster (1826-1864)
The first American to try to make a living purely by writing songs, and a cautionary tale about how that went. He wrote about two hundred, several of which the country still sings without knowing whose they are, and he sold them for almost nothing under contracts that gave him no share of what they earned. Much of his most popular work was written for minstrel shows and carries all the ugliness of that form. He died alone in a New York hotel at thirty-seven with thirty-eight cents in his pocket.
Start with these
The easiest Stephen Foster on the shelf, in order. Nothing here is graded and nobody is ranked: the shelf simply puts the pieces that ask less of your hands before the ones that ask more.
How the reader works
Each score opens as engraved notation you can read from the stand, and it plays: hear the piece first, then slow it down and loop the bar that is not working. There is nothing to install and no account to make. When you want paper, print it.
Every file is MusicXML, so MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico open them too.
Where to go next
If you are learning Stephen Foster rather than only reading, the scale pages cover fingering in every key, the chord pages spell out every chord, and the symbol dictionary explains any mark on the page you do not recognise.