My Old Kentucky Home by Emily Bingham

My Old Kentucky Home 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.

Bingham, Emily: - Emily Bingham is the great-niece of Henrietta Bingham. She is the author of Mordecai and coeditor of The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal. She earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and frequently teaches at Centre College. She lives with her family in Louisville, Kentucky.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780525520795
ISBN 10	0525520791
Title	My Old Kentucky Home
Author	Emily Bingham
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	2022-05-03
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.