My Old Kentucky Home : The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

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, on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and in countless screen adaptations, 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.

• | Author: Emily Bingham
• | Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• | Publication Date: Sep 17, 2024
• | Number of Pages: NA pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1985901315
• | ISBN-13: 9781985901315