Emily Bingham’s book My Old Kentucky Home profoundly decodes both the pop culture and hidden histories of Stephen Foster’s 1853 song.
The Washington Post wrote of the book:
“A powerful story of how, exactly, we fool ourselves into thinking the past is past . . . taking us across a century of spinout marketing campaigns, protests and versions that emerged from Foster’s lyrics . . . [Bingham’s] identity―and its many complications―is vital to her authority as a needed writer of this book.”
In her own words, here is Emily Bingham’s Book Notes music playlist for her book My Old Kentucky Home:
The biography of a song is necessarily filled with music. Part of my research was to listen to countless interpretations of Stephen Foster’s 1853 blackface tune about an enslaved man being sold from Kentucky to the cane fields of the deep south never to see the people he loved again. I’m pretty sure that “My Old Kentucky Home” will course through my brain till my dying day, and you can access a collection of those renditions on my website’s MOKH Music Box.
The book follows a single melody through American culture from the 1850s to the present. That story is interspersed with my and my family’s involvement with the song, its themes, and its 20th-century monumentalization as the Kentucky Derby anthem, my state’s official song, and the emotional touchstone for college sports and political gatherings. Lessons about whiteness and racialized entertainment are audible on both of those registers.
Music’s meanings are constantly morphing, and any song can strike differently from one person to the next; but a key effect of “My Old Kentucky Home” has been to help white people manage and diminish the horror of enslavement by converting it into something they, generation after generation, consumed for pleasure. I would never tell a person not to love a song. Still, I believe we can inflict harm when we fail to understand the things we claim to love.
While the story of “My Old Kentucky Home” is a national one, for Largehearted Boy I tapped into music mostly by Louisville and Kentucky-connected musicians that conveys the inspiration, frustration, determination, release, and hope that went into my writing of this book.
1 Tara Key “One Spark” (Bourbon County, 1993) As any good song should, this gem strikes me at multiple levels, but one is the thrill that comes when the “one spark” of an idea for a book project becomes a commitment. Then I’m plunging into the darkness of research, spinning like Key’s circular riff and incantatory vocals and this is… a kind of happiness. That energy carried me through ugly, disturbing stuff, like the American Minstrel Show Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Key was a founding member of 1980s Louisville punk groups Babylon Dance Band and Antietam (named for one of the bloodiest Civil War battles). When she was touring her second solo release in 1995, I was in the audience. My first child moved inside me for the first time to her extraordinarily expressive guitar.
2 James Taylor, “Oh, Susannah” (Sweet Baby James, 1970) This was my first album. I played it obsessively, age five or six, on a plug-in turntable on the floor of my room. I memorized every line of every song. I didn’t know anything about Stephen Foster, but Taylor’s adaptation set the tone for his career as an all-American bard with a folk vibe. In preparing this playlist, I learned The Byrds covered it (jokingly) five years earlier on Turn! Turn! Turn! Taylor’s warm, slowed-down, straight-man version converts the nonsensical, raucous, and minstrel tune into a love song, eliminating Foster’s “Negro dialect” and racial slurs. I loved every other song on this album more (“Blossom!”) but JT took Foster seriously. Decades later, so did I.
3 Randy Newman, “Old Kentucky Home” (12 Songs, 1970) Newman was thinking about Foster, too. But the artful dodger of American popular composers wasn’t covering the “father of American music” as he was known in the 1960s; he was sending Foster up, and American folk worshippers with him. The music and lyrics are his, but Newman repurposed Foster’s recognizable opener, “The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home,” in his refrain. The persona is a hillbilly drunk on “turpentine, dandelion wine,” waving a gun around a scene of misogyny, incest, addiction, and domestic abuse. This Kentucky home was nothing to romanticize. Newman explained that his politically incorrect song was “about mountain people’s ignorance,” or rather, the irony that so many people, including his educated audience, might “think that’s funny.”
4 Nathan Salsburg, “Sought and Hidden” (Affirmed, 2011) This masterful, Louisville-based guitarist kept me moving ahead through research (seeking hidden things, right?) and writing. My CD of this instrumental release, named for the (till then) last horse to win the Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing, has stayed on regular rotation for almost 15 years. Salsburg’s picking is joyful and pensive, and his reiterative loops partway through “Sought and Hidden” remind me of getting sucked into pockets of research (like the popularity of “My Old Kentucky Home” in Japan) and then having to pull myself up and out.
5 Tyler Childers, “Long Violent History” (Long Violent History, 2020) Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor while I was revising this book. For years, I’d been steeped in the history of an 1850s blackface minstrel song that I’d grown up with. I’d wept when it played each year before the Kentucky Derby. Obviously, I had been doing some reckoning, but now my city was exploding with protests. Officials stonewalled. Police beat and pepper sprayed people. I was ashamed, enraged. Childers’s song opens and closes with bars from “My Old Kentucky Home,” and in between asks his (white) listeners to take the violence visited by police on Black communities seriously. It felt like the answer to a prayer. He regularly performs it in concert, as if to shake us out of innocence, remind us of what Imani Perry called the “unmarked graves, and ash” under our collective feet.
6 John Prine, “Paradise” (John Prine, 1971) This classic protest against the ravages of surface coal extraction in Western Kentucky is regularly proposed as a replacement for “My Old Kentucky Home” as state anthem. It conveys nostalgia, but a nostalgia wrapped in fury at the exploitation of land and the erasure of people and their homes by “Mister Peabody’s coal train.”
7 Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Ghost of Stephen Foster” (Perennial Favorites, 1998) I was an early SNZ fan, having heard about them in Chapel Hill, where I dated the founder of their first record company. The Zippers’ fascination with historic musical genres is clear on this rollicking number. The masterful video on YouTube is worth watching for the way it deploys the gags and stereotypes of mid-century cartoons that frequently included Foster tunes. The songs were out of copyright (free) and carried potent messages about race and power—see for instance “Fresh Hare” (1942). The Squirrel Nut Zippers repeat “Camptown ladies never sang all the doo dah day, no, no, no” as if to undo Foster’s doo dah trance.
8 Silver Jews, “Tennessee” (Bright Flight, 2001) I grew up in Louisville but left at fifteen and returned at thirty, a decision that surprised me and more than a few others. I am devoted to my hometown and a fierce advocate of my home state, but it’s easy to get down on things here sometimes. The next few songs convey some of my mixed feelings. There’s a whole long story about indie rockstars hanging out in Louisville in the 1990s, among them the incomparable Dave Berman, who married Louisville’s Cassie Marrett and spirited her away from Derby City. You can hear her vocals on this ultimately upbeat track, which plots an escape from Louisville (“you know Louisville is death”) to Nashville. The lines, “Her doorbell plays a bar of Stephen Foster/Her sister never left and look what it cost her” are just a bonus.
9 Fiona Apple, “Under the Table” (Fetch the Bolt Cutters, 2020) I came across Apple’s long-awaited release amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Patriarchy teaches white women to be polite, not too loud, not too challenging to social norms, whether “My Old Kentucky Home” as a sonic monument or the corrupt police force on my city’s streets. I felt the pressure—often silent, often internal, sometimes verbalized by others. It helped that Apple made it clear: “I won’t shut up.”
10 Freakwater, “Louisville Lip” (Springtime, 1998) The mountain music-inflected former indie rockers of Freakwater take on a story about Louisville’s G.O.A.T. with tender fury. I never get tired of Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean’s gorgeous, wailing harmonies.
11 Love Jones, “Ohio River” (Here’s to the Losers, 1993) The same river that marked the border between slavery and freedom for Black people here and—probably not but maybe—swallowed Muhammad Ali’s Olympic medal, also offers tangible pleasures. When I need a pick-me-up, I reach for the grooviest and most charming river song I know. “The cooler’s loaded up with beer”—so begin Love Jones, former Louisville punks reincarnated as lounge singers.
12 KD, Villebillies, Goodfella, and Fish Scales, “My Kentucky Home,” (2004) This hip-hop collaboration has been an underground local favorite for two decades but suffered from a problematic release history due in part to copyright issues over a Crosby, Stills, and Nash harmonica riff. I love the song and its story, which I researched for the book. Conceived by Louisville gangster rapper KD in Atlanta with assistance from two members of the chart-topping group Nappy Roots, “My Kentucky Home” aspired to crossover to white listeners, to “bridge the gap,” and to express collective appreciation for Louisville and Kentucky. KD invited Demi Demaree, singer for a Louisville band that blended country and rock with rap. While KD knew the state song to be tainted and experienced Kentucky as a racist place, Demaree had no idea the iconic melody carried blackface baggage and the issue never came up while they were recording. In 2024, KD, Demaree, and B Stille from Nappy Roots released an updated anniversary version.
13 Matt Sweeney and Bonnie Prince Billy, “Shorty’s Ark” (Superwolves, 2021) When live music returned after COVID, my first show was Big Thief with two of my kids. It was transcendent. Will Oldham is in a class all his own, and I was able to snag tickets to his show with Sweeney, held in a local church. I took my goddaughter, who also happens to be Oldham’s goddaughter. She’d never seen him perform. The church pews were uncomfortable. Lots of people were masked. This lullaby washed over us.
14 Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir, “Like a Ship” (Like a Ship…(Without a Sail), 1971) I discovered this track fifty years after it was first recorded (thank you Leon Bridges and Keite Young). It’s one of those tunes I have returned to through the book’s publication for inspiration. If we can sing together in a way that truly lifts us all up… maybe nothing is impossible. For more on Barrett’s remarkable story, see The Quietus.
Emily Bingham is the author of Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham and Mordecai: An Early American Family. Her writing has appeared in Travel and Leisure,Vogue, Ohio Valley History, the Journal of Southern History, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal.