My Old Kentucky Home

The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date May 03 2022 | Archive Date Apr 29 2023

Talking about this book? Use #MyOldKentuckyHome #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

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.
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...

Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780525520795
PRICE $30.00 (USD)
PAGES 368

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (EPUB)
Send to Kindle (EPUB)
Download (EPUB)

Average rating from 4 members


Readers who liked this book also liked: