When Hard Times Come Again

The sweet, mournful melody that was the theme for Ken Burns’ public television series “The Civil War” struck most hearers as period music. But it was in fact an original composition, “Ashokan Farewell,” written by violinist and composer Jay Ungar. The period effect arose from the fact that Ungar wrote uncannily in the manner of the great Stephen Foster, who died in 1864.

One of several happy consequences of Burns’ series has been a quiet Stephen Foster revival. Baritone Thomas Hampton--backed by a group including Ungar himself--released “American Dreamer: Songs of Stephen Foster” in 1992 while “The Civil War” was being shown, and the CD has continued to sell steadily.

Of all the songs on that album, none has struck a deeper chord than Foster’s “Hard Times.” Perhaps in the flush 1980s few would have paused, as Foster asks in his opening lines, to “sup sorrow with the poor.” But a decade later, when everybody knows somebody who has lost a job, the sorrow seems less remote:

While we seek mirth and beauty

and music light and gay,

There are frail forms

fainting at the door.

Though their voices are silent,

their pleading looks will say,

“Oh, hard times,

come again no more!”

By contemporary standards, Foster lays it on pretty thick, but people are evidently willing to listen. Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan have also recently revived “Hard Times.”

What can never be said can sometimes be sung. Self-reliance is the defining virtue of our culture, and most of the time people are as ashamed to offer pity as they would be to ask for it. But Foster sings of pity without shame, and “Hard Times” brings the same hush into the room that “Ashokan Farewell” brought.

In all its simplicity and sentimentality, this song has the daring to open a space for honorable failure in the land of obligatory success. Humming along with its chorus, words that Foster called “the psalm, the sigh, of the weary,” the up-against-it may hear in the heart what pride stops them from saying aloud:

Hard times, hard times,

come again no more.

Many days you have lingered

around my cabin door.

Oh, hard times, come again no more.