Rick Bragg reviews the new book out on a song most of hear once a year when the Kentucky Derby is run; MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily Bingham in the New York Times Book Review. According to Bragg:
It is an old, old song, written in a discredited age and made infamous in blackface, but every spring it rises from the bluegrass and bad hats and bourbon fog, and the people of the Commonwealth sing it alive again. As the beautiful racehorses stomp and shy toward the starting gate, a marching band sounds across the storied turf of Churchill Downs and 150,000 rise to sing a song about a slave torn from his wife and children and sold downriver to Louisiana, into an even deeper hell. And they begin to weep, a lot of them, not because of the evils of chattel slavery, but because that old song, its lyrics and very meaning altered and whitewashed over time, is such a part of their sense of place, of home, that they hear something else. People who love the song say there is, in that moment, 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. It tries to explain how Stephen Foster’s iconic work, one that paints chattel slavery as wistful, warm and deeply lamented, could become the anthem of a place, sung with the reverence of a hymn. But this book is more than just a kind of archaeological deep dig; it attempts a reckoning, a kind that many Southerners, especially, will recognize and understand, because they have long been searching for something like it themselves.
For many Kentuckians, the song would become part of their very hearts. Changing times forced alterations in its lyrics, but removing the offensive words did not change its genesis. It was published in 1853, belying a popular myth that its lyrics are about homesick troops in the Civil War. It was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the story of a slave ripped from his family in Kentucky and sold south, where he is eventually whipped to death. But Foster would paint slavery as sentimental; it was the kind of thing Americans would sing in their parlors.
“The time has come when the darkies have to part, / Then my old Kentucky home, good night!”
Wildly popular, it would be performed by white men in blackface in crowded halls in New York and minstrel shows as far away as Tokyo Bay. It was sung by Bing Crosby and Bugs Bunny and John Prine, and in black-and-white movies, the kind where Shirley Temple tapped across the screen hand in hand with an old Black gentleman in servant’s clothes (played by the legendary Bill Robinson). The song is a thing from antiquity, yes, but in 2022, in an America at war with itself, this book seems to arrive just in time. Bingham, in her words, scrubs off some of that burned cork to see what is underneath.
For Bingham herself, a Harvard-educated child of white privilege whose ancestors owned slaves, it would present a personal contradiction. She wore the big hats, too, and wept when the song played, but would come to realize the sin was not in loving a song but in failing to understand it. And understanding it, knowing its beginnings and long, tortured journey into a third century of painted-over suffering, she reckoned that it did not belong to her, but to those wounded most by it; they should decide its future.
Her book offers its readers the same choice, between understanding and sweet nostalgia, between the splinters and thorns of history and about the worst thing people can do to one another, and a smooth, thin, polished veneer.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
