Stephen Foster – songwriter of the state song of Kentucky, “My Old Kentucky Home”.

So here we have the American quarter dollar. The year of issue of this coin is 2001, mint: Denver, USA. Total circulation – 370.564.000.

Stephen Foster, was born July 4 in 1826, Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania., U.S. — died January 13, 1864 in New York. American composer whose popular minstrel songs and sentimental ballads achieved for him an honoured place in the music of the United States.

When Stephen Foster was in 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 Denny McDowell.

Many of Foster's songs were used in blackface minstrel show entertainment popular at the time. He sought to "build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order".

In the 1850s, he associated with a Pittsburgh-area abolitionist leader named Charles Shiras, and wrote an abolitionist play himself. Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon.