The Racist Song That Has Dug Deep Roots in American Culture

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME
The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Tune
By Emily Bingham

It’s an outdated, outdated track, written in a discredited age and made notorious in blackface, however each spring it rises from the bluegrass and dangerous hats and bourbon fog, and the individuals of the Commonwealth sing it alive once more. As the gorgeous racehorses stomp and shy towards the beginning gate, a marching band sounds throughout the storied turf of Churchill Downs and 150,000 rise to sing a track a few slave torn from his spouse and kids and offered downriver to Louisiana, into a fair deeper hell. And so they start to weep, plenty of them, not due to the evils of chattel slavery, however as a result of that outdated track, its lyrics and really that means altered and whitewashed over time, is such part of their sense of place, of house, that they hear one thing else. Individuals who love the track say there’s, in that second, a sort of serenity, a candy eager for one thing misplaced over the passing years, even when they can not put into phrases what that one thing is.

How this got here to be, how the track so captured these individuals and a wider world, is the haunting query that the native Kentuckian Emily Bingham solutions so completely and forcefully in “My Outdated Kentucky Dwelling,” her historical past of an American track. It tries to elucidate how Stephen Foster’s iconic work, one which paints chattel slavery as wistful, heat and deeply lamented, might turn into the anthem of a spot, sung with the reverence of a hymn. However this guide is greater than only a sort of archaeological deep dig; it makes an attempt a reckoning, a sort that many Southerners, particularly, will acknowledge and perceive, as a result of they’ve lengthy been trying to find one thing prefer it themselves.

For a lot of Kentuckians, the track would turn into a part of their very hearts. Altering instances pressured alterations in its lyrics, however eradicating the offensive phrases didn’t change its genesis. It was revealed in 1853, belying a well-liked fable that its lyrics are about homesick troops within the Civil Conflict. It was impressed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the story of a slave ripped from his household in Kentucky and offered south, the place he’s ultimately whipped to demise. However Foster would paint slavery as sentimental; it was the sort of factor People would sing of their parlors.

“The time has come when the darkies need to half, / Then my outdated Kentucky house, good evening!”

Wildly widespread, it will be carried out by white males in blackface in crowded halls in New York and minstrel reveals as far-off as Tokyo Bay. It was sung by Bing Crosby and Bugs Bunny and John Prine, and in black-and-white motion pictures, the sort the place Shirley Temple tapped throughout the display hand in hand with an outdated Black gentleman in servant’s garments (performed by the legendary Invoice Robinson). The track is a factor from antiquity, sure, however in 2022, in an America at conflict with itself, this guide appears to reach simply in time. Bingham, in her phrases, scrubs off a few of that burned cork to see what’s beneath.