- His most famous song, "Camptown Races", was popularized by the character Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Mel Blanc) in numerous Warner Brothers cartoons.
- It's perhaps appropriate that America's first great popular songwriter was born on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. It was also on that day that two signers of that Declaration, as well as two of America's most revered Presidents, passed on: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
- For all his success as a songwriter, Foster was, by at least one account, a man whose life was plagued by misfortune and unhappiness. When he died in early 1864, aged 37, probably of tuberculosis, it was in a third-rate hotel on the Bowery. Separated from his beloved wife and children, and long since lost in alcoholism, he died with only thirty-seven cents in his pocket and these words scribbled in a piece of paper, "dear hearts and gentle friends." Was it the beginning of a letter? The title of a new song? We will never know.
- Pictured on the 1¢ US postage stamp (as Stephen Collins Foster) in the Famous American/Composers series, issued 3 May 1940.
- Inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1940.
- The Stephen Foster Handicap, name in honor of the composer of "My Old Kentucky Home", is a Thoroughbred horse race run annually since 1982 at Churchill Downs, in Louisville, Kentucky.
- Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
- Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.
- In the My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, Kentucky, an outdoor musical, "The Stephen Foster Story", has been performed annually since 1958.
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