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? In her trenchant new book, “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song” (Knopf; May 3, 2022), acclaimed historian Emily Bingham, 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.
In “My Old Kentucky Home,” Bingham, a Louisville-native who grew up down the road from the Churchill Downs racetrack, offers a deeply researched and incisive biography of one of America's most iconic melodies. In this rich, 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.
Q&A With The Author, Emily Bingham
My Old Kentucky Home will be played at the start of this year's Kentucky Derby, as it has been for many generations. What will you be thinking and feeling when you hear it this Spring?
So many times I remember getting teary-eyed singing along with “My Old Kentucky Home” on Derby Day. The historian Ira Berlin wrote that “Memories … do not evoke skepticism … they demand loyalty.” But we must question them. I love so much about the Derby: the excitement of the parties, placing bets, and those tremendous, gleaming horses. When I learned that “My Old Kentucky Home” was about slavery, I was embarrassed and confused. This book came from digging into the life story of my state anthem, asking how and why we celebrate a song about the selling of human beings. Traditions are about more than inertia. They often involve profit and a kind of emotional power. I have come to believe that this sonic monument provides, for some of us, an almost tribal sense of wellbeing before the horses take off in the longest continuously held sporting event in the nation. I wish Churchill Downs would choose another sound to accompany the horses' parade to the post; I think I know why they cling so hard.
The fans who sing the song at Churchill Downs aren't representative of Kentucky as a whole. They are almost entirely white and wealthy enough to afford tickets to the race. What would you tell them about what the song represents?
People from all over the country and the world come to Louisville for the Derby. It's a dress-up event in the clubhouse, Millionaire's Row, and the posh skybox called “The Mansion,” but it's affordable for the infield crowd, who will hear the stately pre-race anthem even if they don't see a racehorse. The Kentucky Derby is a bucket list event and everyone is invited to put on a hat. This book is about a song with incredibly broad reach. Even before it was the quintessential Derby song, “My Old Kentucky Home” crisscrossed the nation and circled the globe with blackface minstrels, America's most notable nineteenth-century cultural invention. Created by Stephen Foster, a white man, about a Black Kentuckian sent from his family to die in the Deep South, white men in black makeup sang it on stages everywhere. Audiences found it charming, sentimental, even amusing. If we read all three of Foster's stanzas, the horrific words in no way match the breathless pre-race excitement. What role has the leadership and culture of Churchill Downs played in cementing the song's importance over the years?
It's hard to imagine “My Old Kentucky Home” having such wide currency if it weren't officially re-enshrined each year at the Kentucky Derby. Many people think it was written for the Derby's inauguration in 1875, but by then it was already old and Foster was cold in his grave. Churchill Downs appears to have adopted it in 1931, after Kentucky opened a tourist site to honor the song and made it the state anthem. It was a time of Jim Crow laws, Confederate monuments in courthouse squares, and Gone with the Wind romance. Foster's familiar tune helped “Colonel” Matt Winn, the track director and impresario, parlay a second-rate race for 3-year-olds into a charming and exotic destination event full of traditional southern hospitality. Generations of racetrack publicists ever since have puffed “My Old Kentucky Home” to the media and to racegoers as a reflection of the region's beauty and authenticity.
What does it mean that Stephen Foster was from Pittsburgh and spent almost no time at all in the South?
It's counterintuitive but it actually makes sense that Foster (1826-1864), “the Father of American Music” and our first professional pop songwriter, was from Pittsburgh, Penn., and lived there except for a few years in New York City. The “market” for new songs was among urban residents of the North and Midwest—they drove the blackface craze, attending shows and buying up sheet music—and his music publisher was in Manhattan. Foster took one trip to New Orleans and visited Kentucky once as a small child; he was no student of the South. He wrote hits featuring Black people because that's what sold. Around 1900, Kentuckians began touting their ties to the songwriter. There's even a candlestick someone claims he used to light his labors while composing “My Old Kentucky Home” on a local plantation. One journalist called it the “Old Kentucky Hoax.” The larger point is that there is nothing authentically southern or Black about “My Old Kentucky Home” or the countless blackface minstrel melodies and romantic southern ballads that sheet music publishers rolled out year after year. The music sketched for a white nation an imaginary rural land of freedom, fun, harmony, and nostalgia alien to the “Long Violent History” of racial supremacy that the U. S. economy and Foster's own family were built upon and supported.
Four times as many Kentuckians enlisted for the Union Army as they did for the Confederacy. Where did the idea of Kentucky as a bastion of the antebellum South come from?
A saying goes that Kentucky, where large plantations were rare and sent far more soldiers to fight for the Union than for Dixie, joined the Confederacy only after the war. State leaders turned against Lincoln and his party after Emancipation. (By remaining “loyal” during the hostilities white Kentuckians seem to have imagined they could keep their human property, and they did longer than anywhere else, into 1865.) In the post-war decades, former Confederates dominated politics and white racial solidarity trumped wartime divisions. Many Black residents fled. An exhibit at the National Museum of African American History shows the number of Jim Crow laws passed by the Kentucky legislature dwarfing other southern states.
Except for Mississippi, Kentucky was the last state to ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing involuntary servitude—in 1976. Louisville marketed itself as “The Gateway to the South” and as a commercial hub between the regions. To outsiders, Kentucky with its relatively small Black population appeared “moderate” (in Louisville Black citizens could vote and streetcars were not strictly segregated). In 1895 Louisville hosted the first reunion of Union soldiers in a former slave state, and tens of thousands of Northern visitors were welcomed to “The Old Kentucky Home.” Onetime foes sang together, symbolizing white acceptance of “separate but equal,” and a white supremacist racial order featuring “southern hospitality” became Kentucky's signature brand in the 20th century. The Derby would be its quintessential showcase.
Countless Black performers have sung this clearly racist song over the years. How do you explain that?
Most people don't realize that Black Americans were 100 percent shut out of show business until the 1870s and 1880s. When they were permitted to begin appearing on stage, white producers conceived of a way to make the minstrel show appear even more “authentic.” “My Old Kentucky Home” was an easy crowd-pleaser for white-controlled “Negro Minstrel” troupes that toured every town in the nation, large and small, in the late 19th century. The players were expected to put on blackface and perform in demeaning ways to mime the old genre.
Adding another layer of complexity, within the spectrum of American blackface music of the time, “My Old Kentucky Home,” which avoided the n-word, was less offensive than “lowdown” “coon” material. Certain Black performers used Foster's celebrity as a way of claiming respectability.
Defenders will say that greats like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson sang the original version of “My Old Kentucky Home,” but they leave out that these stars ultimately stopped singing it or used different lyrics. Anderson thought the songs should be banned from American schools. Stephen Foster's niece chastised Robeson for not singing Foster the “right” way. He ignored her. Many African Americans hated the old songs and their protests, silent and spoken, have been almost entirely ignored. Black artists should do whatever they want with this old tune, but I submit it's time for whites to stop defending it and stop expecting to be entertained by work that ever presented slavery as a happy “home” for people in bondage.
You come from a prominent Louisville family that used to own the Courier-Journal. What role did the media play in enshrining My Old Kentucky Home's importance? And how did your family's history inform your decision to write this book?
The media loves nostalgia. It's an evergreen hook for listeners, readers, and viewers. Nationally each spring brings stories about Derby traditions—food, mint juleps, hats, celebrities, and of course “My Old Kentucky Home.” Locally, it's part of creating community and promoting an economy that gets an enormous boost from the Kentucky Derby, not just each May but year-round. The first national radio broadcast of the race featured the Pullman Porter Quartet crooning Foster's stanzas about “'Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” Network television Derby programming always featured the singing of the anthem, in recent decades with the lyrics helpfully appearing as subtitles.
When my family owned a radio station in the 1930s, each night the announcer signed off by playing “My Old Kentucky Home” on a set of chimes, sealing it his listeners' dreams. From time to time, a reporter comes across the “real” lyrics of the song or notes an incongruity in the promotion of “My Old Kentucky Home State Park,” a hundred-year-old tourist attraction. In 2021, the part-time cartoonist for the Courier-Journal produced a sketch pointing out that the “home” of Foster's song was not the brick mansion but the slave quarters from which the main character is being ripped away. These questionings produce a ruffle of concern or surprise and always die away in the interest of politeness that protects white self-regard and economic self-interest. One of the men responsible for Foster's prominence declared that the myths about the song had become “Holy writ and history.” This book is my best attempt at an antidote to a contorted picture of the past.
“My Old Kentucky Home” was originally written to be sung by white men in blackface, proclaiming how much better their lives as slaves were in Kentucky than they would be further south. But in later versions, like this popular one by John Prine, the words have been changed. Can a piece of art outgrow its shameful history?
We can't outgrow history until we acknowledge it. Conveniently, dropping the lyrics that make the song's ugly exploitation obvious enables the forgetting of what it is about and how it became and has remained so long, a popular success. In the book, I say that I don't believe it's wrong to love a song, but I do believe we commit wrongs when we do not understand what we claim to love. Stephen Foster was a master of melody and sentiment. He matched horrendous images (“The head must bow and the back will have to bend/Wherever the darky may go”) to lilting music that was easy to sing. He knew that “home” in the abstract was a straight route to the heart.
John Prine recognized his genius. He and others meant well by removing the original lyrics. But stubbornly preserving a whitewashed past has not lifted American society out of catastrophic racial bias and inequity. For generations, “My Old Kentucky Home” glossed over slavery and racial oppression (“The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home”). Music can be mind control. It is time to flip the script on Foster. White people have made the decisions about this song since its inception. It's time to put its fate in the hands of Black Americans who can decide what to do with it, whether to play or sing it and how. Whites have always decided. We shouldn't anymore.
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