Hard Times Come Again No More

Stephen Foster wrote the words and the music, and Firth, Pond and Company published it in New York in 1854, in E flat, marked Moderato. It was a parlor song, sold as sheet music for a singer and a piano, and it asks the people doing well to stop and remember the ones who are not.

Foster himself did badly in the ten years after it. He sold off the future royalties on his songs, his marriage went through long separations, and he died in the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York in January 1864, at thirty seven, with thirty eight cents in his pocket.

The song outlived him by a long way. Bob Dylan recorded it on Good as I Been to You in 1992. James Taylor sang it with Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor on Appalachian Journey in 2000. Old-time and bluegrass players took it up as a slow song for the end of a jam, and it is one of the few songs from the 1850s that a room of strangers can still sing together.

On a mandolin in G the tune lies under the hand on the D, A and E courses, from the G at the fifth fret of the D course to the g on the E course. It is slow, the notes are mostly the same B and A over again, and the work is in the tone. Let every long note ring for its full length, and play the chorus's c sharp cleanly, because that one note is where the song turns.