My Old Kentucky Home
The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song
- 352 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingham takes readers on the journey of a melody, from its inception by a white northerner, to its enormous success on the blackface circuit, in recordings by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to its countless screen appearances, including Shirley Temple movies, The Simpsons, and Mad Men.
For almost two centuries, "My Old Kentucky Home" has never been just a song—it continues to be a resonant, changing emblem of America's original sin, whose blood-drenched shadow haunts us still. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song investigates the tune's hidden history, lodged in the nation's cultural DNA, and ends with a startling solution for what to do with this artifact of race and slavery.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Praise for My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song
- Also by Emily Bingham
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!
- Preface: The Forgetting
- 1. ’tis Summer, The Darkies Are Gay: Stephen Foster, Ethiopian Songwriter
- 2. The Corn Top’s Ripe: White Men’s Music
- 3. The Little Cabin Floor: “Negro” Minstrelsy
- 4. The Sun Shines Bright: White Reunification
- 5. To Tote The Weary Load: The Burden of Black Uplift
- 6. Where All Was Delight: Creating the Old Kentucky Home
- 7. We Will Sing One Song: Fostering an American Consensus
- 8. Wherever The Darky May Go: The D-Word as Destiny
- 9. They Sing No More: Black Power and Back to Bardstown
- 10. Weep No More: A Sonic Monument
- Coda: My Old Kentucky Home
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Illustration Credits