My Old Kentucky Home

The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

By: Emily Bingham

Narrated by: Emily Bingham

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.

©2022 Emily Bingham (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“People who love the song say there is . . . a kind of serenity, a sweet longing for something lost over the passing years, even if they cannot put into words what that something is. How this came to be, how the song so captured these people and a wider world, is the haunting question that the native Kentuckian Emily Bingham answers so thoroughly and forcefully in My Old Kentucky Home, her history of an American song . . . knowing its beginnings and long, tortured journey into a third century of painted-over suffering, [Bingham] reckoned that it did not belong to her, but to those wounded most by it; they should decide its future.”—Rick Bragg, The New York Times

“A powerful story of how, exactly, we fool ourselves into thinking the past is past . . . an account that is both riveting and thorough, taking us across a century of spinout marketing campaigns, protests and versions that emerged from Foster’s lyrics. Shirley Temple, Colonel Sanders, the country of Japan, Henrietta Vinton Davis, J.K. Lilly, Marian Anderson, Richard M. Nixon, the 31W Highway, “Mad Men”—and yes, the Kentucky Derby—are all summoned . . . Bingham’s research is finely detailed, extensive, complex. Further, her identity—and its many complications—is vital to her authority as a needed writer of this book.”—The Washington Post

“Beautifully written . . . deeply personal . . . riveting . . . Because [Bingham’s] personal and family experiences in so many ways parallel the song, this book can be characterized as a love letter — but one with tears in the eyes — to the commonwealth of Kentucky. The book also has a serious and important national reach.”—Courier Journal

Sing One Song... But Which One

For anyone who has heard the strains of My Old Kentucky Home on the first Saturday in May – and millions of us have – Emily Bingham’s book is an essential prism that refracts the song into a spectrum of race, slavery, Jim Crow, minstrelsy, the Lost Cause myth, and the gauze of nostalgia.

Her exploration of the song’s past and present is engaging, illuminating, and unsettling. Bingham analysis of the origin and use of My Old Kentucky from its composition until just this May (and so many before) makes the easy sentimentality of “sing one song…” much less easy.

Professor Bingham makes us see that the lyrics, in fact, tell the sad story of a slave being sold literally down the river from Kentucky to the Deep South, rather than expressing a universal longing for home. Yes, they are less militantly racist than Maryland, My Maryland (just recently dropped as the state song of Maryland), but they are all the more seductive for that. The bright sunshine, ripe corn tops, and blooming meadows create a wistfulness for a home far away that distracts us from the true cause of the longing Stephen Foster memorialized.

Recent changes to Foster's original lyrics – "old folks" in the place of racially charged language and the truncation of the song after the first verse – do less to correct the past than disguise it.

It will be hard to hear “weep no more my lady…” next May without being reminded of the deep roots of Kentucky and all of the nation in racial injustice and the race-based cruelty of slavery. And that, I think, is just as well.

This is a terrific book.

Outstanding in several ways. Highly recommended.

It's about the ways, often subtle, that white supremacy is woven into American society.

Important and engaging book

A really insightful consideration of the Foster song’s creation and performance history. This book considers the way in which a beloved (by some) song has a complicated and ultimately damning backstory, and how attempts to whitewash it with updated lyrics can’t erase the stain of a history imbued with white supremacy. I thought the author gave a fine reading, and overall I recommend this book whole heartedly.

Powerful story. Weak performance.

A comprehensive telling of the racial overtones and undertones of a beloved song by our most famous songwriter. Excellent lessons for us white folks, presented powerfully. There was probably more detail than necessary, especially details about the Steven Foster shrine's historical errors. She beat that to death. The reader (the author) didn't do it justice, but it was still a good listen.