My Old Kentucky Home

February 28, 2022
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.

March 1, 2022

Drawing from extensive research and personal experience, Bingham (Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham) explores the history of Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," a pre-Civil War song about a Black man sold down the river, written by a white man and often performed by white men in blackface. Bingham unravels the false narratives that were created around Foster's song in the 20th century, meant to indulge myths about plantation life, encourage visits from white tourists eager to see an idyllic South, and foster sentimentality for a past overflowing with injustices. She uses sheet music covers, photographs, and illustrations to demonstrate the contradictions between the actual treatment of Black people in the American South and the stories about slavery told by and for white people. Bingham asks readers to think critically about a song cherished by many and to consider the price of nostalgia; she concludes that one can love a song and still relinquish it as a symbol of hope or compassion. VERDICT Bingham convincingly argues that listeners cannot disconnect "My Old Kentucky Home" from its fraught and dishonest history and that the only way forward is to stop performing it altogether. Readers familiar with the song will get the most out of this book, as will anyone with a deep interest in the intersections of music and history.--Elizabeth Berndt-Morris

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2022
Louisville native Bingham (Irrepressible, 2015) grew up singing "My Old Kentucky Home," thinking of it as a nostalgic folk song. Years later she learned that the original lyrics penned by Stephen Foster in 1853 tell the story of an enslaved man who has been sold to die in the deep South. This examination of the song traces its history and relevance to the modern day. Written as a minstrel song, it allowed white Americans to imagine that life as a slave was not as horrific as it was. Over time, the "home" was reimagined in popular memory, from a slave cabin to a white family's grand house lost to time. Debates in the 1950s over dropping a slur from the lyrics illuminated the continued grip of white supremacy alongside the growing civil rights movement. After the 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor, organizers at Churchill Downs reconsidered whether to play the song before the Kentucky Derby. Describing her own relationship to the song as a white Kentuckian, Bingham offers a well-researched history of music, race, and American memory.

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April 15, 2022
An author and historian with roots in Kentucky traces the fraught history of the song "My Old Kentucky Home." Bingham interweaves several narratives in her exploration of American composer Stephen Foster's famous song. The author traces the song's history and how it evolved from a tale of an enslaved Black man to a sanitized, nostalgic look at plantation life. She follows the story of Foster, who died young but became known as "the father of American music." Bingham chronicles how Kentucky's identity evolved from that of a state whose soldiers fought mostly for the Union to one whose official song presents an elegiac portrait of Southern life. She plumbs personal reminiscences of her own family, from a Confederate ancestor to her crusading liberal father, who ran the Louisville Courier-Journal. Bingham delivers many sections of fierce cultural criticism of the White appropriation of Black music and laments how the song has become embedded in the psyche of Kentuckians. It's a lot to hang on one song, and the results are mixed. Many readers will wish for a more in-depth musical analysis of what makes "My Old Kentucky Home" so compelling. Given the author's privilege within an influential Kentucky family, some readers may be put off by implied criticism of Black leaders who endorsed the song and Black musicians who have played it. In this piece of her analysis, Bingham gives inadequate credit to the predicament of Black Americans trying to make their ways in a White world. This book is clearly a labor of diligent scholarship, conviction, and repentance for the author, who has apologized for her family's slowness to respond to Black concerns when they owned the newspaper. Her conclusion that Black Americans decide the fate of the song should be the final word; only they can truly understand the weight of the history and what it means today. A well-researched but uneven mixture of history, memoir, and cultural criticism.

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