The great jazz singer-songwriter Jon Hendricks does a brilliant comedy bit. He begins by saying that he once honored a request to do “My Old Kentucky Home” and starts to lustily sing, “… Oh the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home,” then continues, “‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” At this point, Mr. Hendricks pauses, turns squarely to the crowd with a deadpan look and says, “Man! Stephen Foster was a real drag!”

Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. Scholars of both classical and popular music have little use for American music produced any time during the 19th century — other than Foster (1826–64), not one composer of that era is considered relevant today, in, say, the way that the music of Brahms or Gilbert and Sullivan are still very much with us.

Little is said or done with American music before the emergence of Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, and Charles Ives near the turn of the last century. Foster is generally regarded as an icon of the musically (and politically and racially) backward and sentimental dreck that came out of the Civil War era. This is what Americans had to contend with until the great innovators of the 20th century brought the nation’s music to dominate the world stage from the jazz age onward.

However, three recently released CDs make the point that the early days of American pop — the time between the Civil War and World War I — were a rich and fertile period, and contain much for contemporary musicians (not to mention historians) to reexamine, redigest, and otherwise chew on. It’s also pertinent that not one of these new albums — Jeff Newell’s New Trad Octet: “Brownstone” (Blujazz); Andy Biskin Quartet: “Early American: The Melodies of Stephen Foster” (Strudelmedia), and Dan Levinson and His Canary Cottage Dance Orchestra: “Steppin’ Around” (Stomp Off) — is any kind of recreation. Rather, all three are a reimagining of the raw materials that later went into the creation of jazz and American pop.

The goals of Mr. Biskin’s project are impossible, but straightforward: to create modern jazz utilizing clarinet, tuba, banjo, and Foster’s Civil War-era melodies. Mr. Biskin employs the instrumentation of a Dixieland band, and plays tunes that would have seemed old fashioned even to Dixielanders. But it’s also remarkably modern: The group’s use of guitar or banjo as a chordal instrument in place of the piano, juxtaposed against the leader’s expressive, ashen-toned clarinet, gives the project a feel more akin to postmodernists such as Jimmy Giuffre or Tony Scott. (The use of Bill Frisell-like sound washes on Mr. Biskin’s liberally rewritten “Camptown Races” might lead one to guess that this was one of the Paul Motian-Joe Lovano groups playing Foster’s music in a blindfold test.)

Mr. Biskin has interwoven these freshly conceived two horn-two rhythm arrangements of Foster classics with his own originals, which seem like responses to Foster’s melodies as well as interpretations of the mature American vernacular style that Foster’s music ultimately led to. “Fits and Starts,” for instance, is an odd-meter funk number that Raymond Scott could have written for a New Orleans brass band.

Mr. Biskin may reinterpret Foster’s tunes, but he never subverts them or alters their meanings, and in letting “Oh! Susanna” be alternately wistful and jaunty, or in letting “Beautiful Dreamer,” in which the melody is played by trombonist Chris Washburne, be haunting and lyrical, he shows us that Foster’s mid-19th century hits still have much to say.

Jeff Newell’s “Brownstone” does for the marches of John Philip Sousa, another landmark of early American music, what Mr. Biskin does for Foster’s ballads. He begins with new treatments of three Sousa pieces, generally keeping the march tempo going but playing around with the instrumentation and coloration of these worldfamous staples of parades everywhere: “Stars and Stripes Forever,” for instance, has a rock-style electric guitar fuzzing out the notes.

The bulk of the album is a sixmovement suite called “Hymn Pan Alley,” in which the Brooklynbased saxophonist contemplates the roots of American music in such sources as Viennese waltzes and Spanish boleros. At its most ingenious, “Brownstone” suggests the “avant-gutbucket” ensemble style of such major postmodern jazz bandleaders as Charles Mingus and David Murray. And though it’s extremely clean, in the manner of music for a theater piece or the soundtrack to a Ken Burns documentary, one can’t help but occasionally yearn for a little seasoning of dissonance and distortion, like a free-jazz nosebleed screech or some rock ‘n’ roll headbanging. “Brownstone” ends with two pieces that come directly out of the tradition of church music, the first of which is a new treatment of the oft-performed “Amazing Grace.”

Upon first listen, “Steppin’ Around,” the second album by the Canary Cottage Dance Orchestra, sounds so painstakingly authentic that it’s hard to believe these six musicians and assorted vocalists are playing newly crafted arrangements (by leader-clarinetist Dan Levinson) of vintage tunes, rather than transcriptions or stock arrangements from the period. The CCDO’s purview is the American pop sound of the mid-teens, immediately before the explosion of the jazz age. But that point of view can extend backward to ragtime-tinged arrangements of Foster’s music, and forward a decade to the old-fashioned waltz “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilactime,” which illustrates the Roaring 20s idea of nostalgia.

In a brilliant contrapuntal collage, the CCDO weaves Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” into the 1921 song “Tuck Me to Sleep in My Old ‘Tucky Home.” We’ve long known that Foster inspired several generations of Tin Pan Alley songwriters with his mammy-centric melodies — even George Gershwin made his musical journey way down upon Foster’s Suwannee River. But Mr. Levinson shows us that the composers of what eventually became known as the Great American Songbook appropriated Foster’s harmonies as well, since the 1921 trip to the “Old Kentucky Home” revisits Foster’s exact chord progressions. There are some effective vocals by 23-year-old Molly Ryan, banjoist-drummer John Gill, and trombonist David Sager, but the most compelling “singing” here is the exquisite vocal tone of Mr. Levinson’s Cmelody saxophone on “I Dream of Jeannie.”

Foster died at age 37 in 1864, probably without ever having heard a saxophone. These new interpretations make him seem like the most modern, hip composer who ever lived.