"TAKE ME BACK" SONGS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 155, 29 December 1938, Page 11

"TAKE ME BACK" SONGS

BY ABSENTEE WRITERS'

The news that the United States is to erect a memorial beside the Swanee (Suwannee) Hiver to Stephen Foster, the composer who immortalised the name of that stream in.his.song "Old Folks at Home," is a reminder that » Foster himself never saw it, says the , "Manchester Guardian." For the . • Suwannee River flows through Florida and Foster never went there. Possibly the idea of a memorial would appeal to the Ireland whose Tipperary was made equally famous by the song of Jack Judge, who died not long ago. There is no record that Judge ever saw Tipperary. Indeed, howmany composers of "take-me-back" songs ever saw the places;they made famous? Perhaps the most striking example of those "who did not w^as s John Howard Payne, who, although he wrote the words of "Home, Sweet } Home," never in his life knew what a real home was. He was born in New York in 1797, -but early fled to ' England and spent the rest of his life in escaping creditors and' being hound- y . Ed from pillar to post. To escape the duns he fled to Paris, and it was there that he wrote the text of "Home, Sweet iHome" to the music of Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. He returned to America, was again dogged by duns, and went^ as Consul to Tunis, where he died in 1R52.