Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

300 traditional songs, inc sheet music with full piano accompaniment & lyrics.

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OLD DOG TRAY.                                                   5
It has been said that Foster received $15,000 for " Old Folks at Home." This is incor-
rect ; but one pupublishing house paid hun nearly $20,000 for those of his compositions which were issued by them. His songs have been translated into most of the European and some of the Asiatic languages.
Mr. Foster spent his last years in New York, where the most familiar sound was a strain of his own music, and the least familiar sight a face that he knew. He became somewhat improvident, and would sell for a few dollars a song that brought a large sum to its purchaser. Several of his best were composed in a back room of an old down-town grocery, on pieces of brown wrapping-paper. He died in a hospital to which he had been carried from a hotel in the Bowery, January 18, 1864.
Of " Old Dog Tray," 125,000 copies were sold in eighteen months.