My Old Kentucky Home
The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The long journey of an American song, passed down from generation to generation, bridging a nation’s fraught disconnect between history and warped illusion, revealing the country's ever evolving self.
MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man, considered the father of American music, about a Black man being sold downriver, performed for decades by white men in blackface, and the song, an anthem of longing and pain, turned upside down and, over time, becoming a celebration of happy plantation life.
It is the state song of Kentucky, a song that has inhabited hearts and memories, and in perpetual reprise, stands outside time; sung each May, before every Kentucky Derby, since 1930.
Written by Stephen Foster nine years before the Civil War, “My Old Kentucky Home” made its way through the wartime years to its decades-long run as a national minstrel sensation for which it was written; from its reference in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind to being sung on The Simpsons and Mad Men.
Originally called “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!” and inspired by America’s most famous abolitionist novel, it was a lament by an enslaved man, sold by his "master," who must say goodbye to his beloved family and birthplace, with hints of the brutality to come: “The head must bow and the back will have to bend / Wherever the darky may go / A few more days, and the trouble all will end / In the field where the sugar-canes grow . . .”
In My Old Kentucky Home, Emily Bingham explores the long, strange journey of what has come to be seen by some as an American anthem, an integral part of our folklore, culture, customs, foundation, a living symbol of a “happy past.” But “My Old Kentucky Home” was never just a song. It was always a song about slavery with the real Kentucky home inhabited by the enslaved and shot through with violence, despair, and degradation.
Bingham explores the song’s history and permutations from its decades of performances across the continent, entering into the bloodstream of American life, through its twenty-first-century reassessment. It is a song that has been repeated and taught for almost two hundred years, a resonant changing emblem of America's original sin whose blood-drenched shadow hovers and haunts us still.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The history behind Kentucky's veneration of the Stephen Foster song "My Old Kentucky Home" is probed in this immersive and well-honed account. Journalist Bingham (Irrepressible) highlights the song's enduring popularity despite the "pitiful tale" it tells of a "nameless ‘darky' looks fondly on a once carefree life in slavery, submits to ‘Hard Times,' and exits the world, head bowed, back bent, in song." She notes that Foster, a white Pennsylvanian, aimed to make his blackface minstrel songs appealing to "refined audiences" by removing "‘Negro' dialect" and "violent or sexual references" from his compositions. After Foster's death in 1864, his relatives in Bardstown, Ky., circulated the false claim that he had composed "My Old Kentucky Home" at their estate, known as Federal Hill. Bingham documents the origins of the myth, which resulted in Federal Hill becoming Kentucky's first state-owned park, and poignantly reflects on her memories of singing the song at the Kentucky Derby without thinking about what it might mean to Black listeners. Elsewhere, she astutely analyzes the song's reinterpretation by Black artists and activists, and discusses how the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor cast Kentucky's Lost Cause mythology in a harsh new light. The result is an invigorating and eye-opening cultural history.
