One Last Song In A Tattered Coat

One Last Song in a Tattered Coat

There was a time that he had written songs that made the whole world sing. Now he was just another drunken bum in the Bowery, ravaged with fever and starving to death. On a cold winter’s morning, this shell of a man staggered out of his bed and stumbled to the public washbasin in a cheap flophouse. He fell and shattered the sink. They found him naked and incoherent, bleeding from a deep gash in his throat. A quack doctor was called to the scene. He used a string of black sewing thread to suture the wound. All the time the bum begged for a drink. A buddy shared the bottom of a bottle of cheap rum to dull his pain.

The bum was dumped into a police paddy wagon and dropped off at Bellevue Hospital, where he was left on a dirty gurney in the charity ward. He languished for three days without food or attention before he finally gasped his last breath. No one cared that a homeless drunk from the Bowery had died.

A friend came looking for him in the morgue. He found the body among rows of other nameless corpses with “John Doe” tags on their toes. When the friend gathered the man’s meager belongings, he found a tattered coat with a few cents in one pocket and a scrap of paper in the other. Five words were scribbled on it: “Dear friends and gentle hearts.” As the friend looked at these words, he wondered if they were the beginnings of a song.

Why would a Bowery bum carry around a line of lyrics? Could it be that he still believed he had the old magic? Was it possible that the heart of a genius still beat faintly in the emaciated body of a derelict? After all, there was a time long ago when he had written more than two hundred songs that are indelibly etched in our American heritage. Every schoolchild has sung his most famous songs: “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” Who would have guessed that the Bowery bum was Stephen F. Foster, the most prolific songwriter in American history?

Is there anyone who is beyond redemption? At the dead end of his life, the father of American music still carried a scrap of hope in his tattered coat pocket. Every life, no matter how battered, still carries a scrap of hope and a melody waiting to be reborn. Some are in hospitals, others in nursing homes, and still others in prisons. Others are unwanted children in their mothers’ wombs, but they still have a song to sing. Still others are people who slip into church each Sunday, but they are too discouraged to sing a song. Have the songs in your soul been silenced by the adversities of life? Don’t lose heart. You still have songs locked in your soul, waiting to be written. Remember Stephen Foster’s story in the light of this line from the blind hymn writer Fanny Crosby:

Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.

Let the ruins of Jerusalem break into joyful song, for the LORD has comforted his people. He has redeemed Jerusalem.

Isaiah 52:9