My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily S. Bingham Read Books
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My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily S. Bingham
The long journey of an American song, 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