Book 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…
Why read it?
1 author picked My Old Kentucky Home as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
It is a ritual in Kentucky to sing “My Old Kentucky Home” every year at the Kentucky Derby. I just never knew how fraught and controversial that seemingly harmless ritual was before reading this book.
Bingham traces the song back through its genesis in Stephen Foster’s pen, its career as a staple of blackface minstrelsy, the campaign of balderdash and hoopla that led to the “My Old Kentucky Home” state park, and the racial controversies that have surrounded the song since the 1920s.
Amid all these controversies, white people have routinely insisted that it’s “just a song”; by uncovering its…
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