How did a minstrel song about the slave trade become a beloved melody, a celebratory anthem, and an integral part of American folklore and culture? Acclaimed historian Emily Bingham’s new book, explores the compelling history of Stephen Foster’s 1853 “My Old Kentucky Home,” which tried to present slavery as carefree while also telling a wrenching story of a man sold to die in the sugarcane fields of the Deep South. The song—for years sung by white men in blackface entertaining white audiences—was a sensation and has been with us ever since.
For almost two centuries, its lyrics and meaning have been protested, altered, mythologized in thousands of performances—from Bing Crosby to Bugs Bunny to John Prine and Prissy in Gone with the Wind—and enshrined as the state song of Kentucky. Every year at the world’s most important horse race, the Kentucky Derby, “My Old Kentucky Home” is sung by tens of thousands of nostalgic fans, almost all of them unknowingly conjuring a mythic version of a brutal past.
Bingham, a Louisville-native offers a deeply researched as well as a personal and incisive biography of one of America’s most iconic melodies. In this resonant history, we see the enduring ability to forget and deny the realities of slavery, and Bingham, by casting an unflinching eye on our cultural inheritance, leads us to the promise of a reckoning.
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