In its first verse, the Stephen Foster ballad “My Old Kentucky Home” evokes a simpler time in the state’s history, painting a scene of care-free life on the farm during a languid summer afternoon in the young commonwealth. The melody, much more singable than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” flows like smooth bourbon awash in nostalgia. Yes, hard times loom, but for now everyone is merry, happy and bright.
It’s a combination of words and music so affecting that even people with no connection to Kentucky can find themselves wistful. Baltimore-born sportswriter Frank Deford once wrote, “Any good man will cloud up when they play ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’” about the annual performance of the song just before the Kentucky Derby,
But too-often lost in that soothing glow of sentimentality is the true essence of the ballad as a description of the horrors of slavery and of the fate of an estimated 80,000 Black Kentuckians that were torn from their families and sold to plantation owners in the deep south to work sugar cane and cotton fields. It is that reality that historian Emily Bingham explores in her new book “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.”
“It was clearly the story of... someone being sold from Kentucky to die far away, never to see their loved ones again,” she says.
Creating a Myth of ‘Benevolent’ Slavery
Stephen Foster was born in Pittsburgh in 1826 and became America’s first professional songwriter, according to Bingham. In his short life – he lived only 35 years – Foster penned more than 200 pieces of music, ranging from parlor songs like “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer” to minstrel tunes like “Camptown Races” and “Oh! Susanna.” Minstrelsy was widely popular in the northern states in the early to mid-1800s as audiences flocked to see actors, usually white, wearing blackface makeup as they danced, sang, and performed skits.
“They acted out being enslaved people... for fun, it was entertainment,” says Bingham. “There was always a demeaning aspect to this because this was not Black people writing their own songs and stories.”
Bingham says Foster had no connection to Kentucky other than one or two brief visits to the state, and she says he certainly didn’t write “My Old Kentucky Home” at Federal Hill, the restored brick mansion that is the centerpiece of My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown.
And while some have interpreted the song to be a statement against slavery, Bingham says there’s nothing to indicate that Foster was an abolitionist despite his lyrics in the second and third verses depicting enslaved Kentuckians laboring on sugar cane plantations in the deep south.
“This seems like something that would arouse people to do something about a horrible crime against humanity, which was the slave trade,” says Bingham. “But it didn’t. It didn’t do that.”
In fact, Bingham argues, the song does the opposite, especially in the first verse that normalizes slavery in the commonwealth as a benign institution where enslaved children spend their days playing in their cabin and, in Foster’s words, “darkies are gay.”
“This creates a myth that slavery in Kentucky was benevolent, that it was fine,” Bingham says. “We in this century know that that’s a myth that has harmed countless generations of white and Black Americans.”
Although Kentucky had few large plantations compared to other southern states, it had some 38,000 slave owners by the time of the Civil War. The slave trade became a huge business in the commonwealth with auction houses in Louisville, Lexington, and elsewhere selling enslaved individuals to plantation owners farther south. Under the auctioneer’s gavel, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters were sold away from their families and sent to distant owners. Even those that remained lived under the constant threat that they too would go on the auction block one day, according to Bingham.
Fond Memories for Some, Painful Memories for Others
Although “My Old Kentucky Home” proved a hit for Foster when he published it in 1853, its popularity continued long after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Bingham says Kentucky business and political leaders embraced the song in the 1920s as a way to promote the commonwealth to a nation that looked upon the state as poor, backwards, and riddled with bloody feuds. The state park in Bardstown opened in 1923, and the legislature adopted the tune as the state song in 1928. At the 1930 Kentucky Derby, according to Bingham, Churchill Downs replaced the playing of the national anthem with “My Old Kentucky Home,” thus cementing the association of the song with the legendary horse race for people around the world to the present day.
Even while white men and women teared-up at the song between sips of their mint juleps, Black Americans rankled at how it glorified an ugly part of the state’s history. (It wasn’t until 1986, that the General Assembly removed “darkies” from the official lyrics for the song.) Bingham says the late Lyman Johnson, a Louisville educator and civil rights leader, urged his high school students not to sing the song or stand when it was played. Muhammad Ali never sang the song, according to his wife, Lonnie.
Even today, University of Kentucky baseball team captain Dorian Hairston told Bingham that he will leave Rupp Arena anytime the song is played.
“I truly believe that most Kentuckians just don’t know that those feelings exist for fellow Kentuckians... it’s like we have a segregated memory,” she says. “I don’t want my fellow Kentuckians to feel that way about a symbol of our state.”
Like many people, Bingham says the song has been a part of her life since childhood when she learned to play the tune on a recorder in school. Later she heard the song on Derby Day visits to Churchill Downs with her grandfather, Barry Bingham, Sr., long-time owner of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times newspapers.
“I grew up loving this song,” she says. “It was passed down to me as a cherished tradition.”
It wasn’t until later in life that the University of North Carolina-trained historian decided to delve into the origins of the song, how it took hold in the state’s culture, and what it means for Kentuckians today.
“I can’t sing it any more because of what I know of how it makes others feel,” says Bingham.
Some Kentuckians have encouraged the General Assembly to adopt a new state song, such as Bill Monroe bluegrass tunes “Kentucky Waltz” or “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” But rather than simply shelving Foster’s ballad in favor of another song, Bingham wants Kentuckians to reflect how “My Old Kentucky Home” has denied the full humanity of enslaved Americans of Stephen Foster’s day, and how its continued prominence impacts Black Kentuckians today. She also encourages conversations about the value of having a blackface minstrel song from the antebellum era represent the commonwealth in the 21st century.
“Whether this is a brand that makes sense for us in the next century is, I think. a question for all Kentuckians,” says Bingham. “But we’re not going to move or decide that by just leaving it up to our Black brothers and sisters.”
