At the end of the movie, singer/composer/showman Edwin Pearce Christy, the founder of the blackface group Christy's Minstrels, announces the death of Stephen Foster at a benefit performance. Foster died on January 13, 1864. Christy could not have delivered the eulogy as he took his own life two years earlier on May 21, 1862, while facing financial ruin brought on by the Civil War.