He attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania, and received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin, Greek, and mathematics.

In 1839, his brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at Towanda and thought that Stephen would benefit from being under the supervision of Henry Kleber (1816–1897), a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh.

[8] Foster married Jane Denny McDowell on July 22, 1850, and they visited New York and Baltimore on their honeymoon.

Foster then returned to Pennsylvania and wrote most of his best-known songs: "Camptown Races" (1850), "Nelly Bly" (1850), "Ring de Banjo" (1851), "Old Folks at Home" (known also as "Swanee River", 1851), "My Old Kentucky Home" (1853), "Old Dog Tray" (1853), and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), written for his wife Jane.

[11] However, Foster's output of minstrel songs declined after the early 1850s, as he turned primarily to parlor music.

[15] His leather wallet contained a scrap of paper that simply said, "Dear friends and gentle hearts", along with 37 cents in Civil War scrip and three pennies.

[14] As O'Connell and musicologist Ken Emerson have noted, several of the songs Foster wrote during the last years of his life foreshadow his death, such as "The Little Ballad Girl" and "Kiss Me Dear Mother Ere I Die."

[17] The note inside Foster's wallet is said to have inspired Bob Hilliard's lyric for "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" (1949).

[18] Foster grew up in Lawrenceville, now a neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where many European immigrants had settled and were accustomed to hearing the music of the Italian, Scots-Irish, and German residents.

Some of the hymns are "Seek and ye shall find",[20] "All around is bright and fair, While we work for Jesus",[21] and "Blame not those who weep and sigh".

[22] Several rare Civil War-era hymns by Foster were performed by The Old Stoughton Musical Society Chorus, including "The Pure, The Bright, The Beautiful", "Over The River", "Give Us This Day", and "What Shall The Harvest Be?".

It is the largest repository for original Stephen Foster compositions, recordings, and other memorabilia his songs have inspired worldwide.

His home in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, still remains on Penn Avenue nearby the Stephen Foster Community Center.

It has a long reputation as the most controversial public art in Pittsburgh "for its depiction of an African-American banjo player at the feet of the seated composer.

Critics say the statue glorifies white appropriation of black culture and depicts the vacantly smiling musician in a way that is at best condescending and at worst racist.

"[37] A city-appointed Task Force on Women in Public Art called for the statue to be replaced with one honoring an African American woman with ties to the Pittsburgh community.

[39] The musicologist Ken Emerson has suggested that some of Foster's songs are "a source of racial embarrassment and infuriation.