Decades after his death, Stephen C. Foster's (1826--64) family and fans seized upon his birth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and his role in the burgeoning US music industry to mythologize him as a founding father in American cultural history. Hailing him as the father of American music and symbol of US democracy at the end of the nineteenth century required the collective forgetting of certain facts of his life, particularly his initial rise to fame through controversial minstrel songs depicting nostalgia for enslavement.

In Formulating Foster, musicologist and librarian Christopher Lynch re-examines the myth of the founding of American music, drawing upon previously unknown archival materials and oral histories to uncover the myth's origins and expose the deliberate work of the Foster family and the wealthy philanthropist Josiah K. Lilly in embedding it in American institutions. By gathering and contextualizing all the remembrances written by acquaintances of the composer, Lynch lays out a roughly ninety-year process following Foster's death that gradually engrained the myth in American popular consciousness. Stripping away the myth's artificiality, Formulating Foster presents a richer, more humanizing portrait of the composer, illuminating important aspects of his life and character and proposing new ways to understand his music.