Fletcher Hodges Jr.

Who was Fletcher Hodges Jr.?

Fletcher Hodges, Jr. was a leading American expert on the music of Stephen Collins Foster, who was known as the "father of American music."

Hodges, an Indiana native, graduated from Harvard University. He was hired during the Great Depression by Josiah K. Lilly, Sr., owner of the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical corporation, to organize the Lilly family's archive of Foster materials, which then numbered 20,000 items. Lilly was a friend of University of Pittsburgh Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman, and he later donated the archive in 1937 to Bowman's newly constructed Stephen Foster Memorial on the Pitt campus. Hodges moved from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with the collection. What began for Hodges as a three-month assignment for Lilly endured as a 51-year curatorship of the Foster collection.