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

The history behind Kentucky’s veneration of the Stephen Foster song “My Old Kentucky Home” is probed in this immersive and well-honed account. Journalist Bingham (Irrepressible) highlights the song’s enduring popularity despite the “pitiful tale” it tells of a “nameless ‘darky’ [who] looks fondly on a once carefree life in slavery, submits to ‘Hard Times,’ and exits the world, head bowed, back bent, in song.” She notes that Foster, a white Pennsylvanian, aimed to make his blackface minstrel songs appealing to “refined audiences” by removing “‘Negro’ dialect” and “violent or sexual references” from his compositions. After Foster’s death in 1864, his relatives in Bardstown, Ky., circulated the false claim that he had composed “My Old Kentucky Home” at their estate, known as Federal Hill. Bingham documents the origins of the myth, which resulted in Federal Hill becoming Kentucky’s first state-owned park, and poignantly reflects on her memories of singing the song at the Kentucky Derby without thinking about what it might mean to Black listeners. Elsewhere, she astutely analyzes the song’s reinterpretation by Black artists and activists, and discusses how the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor cast Kentucky’s Lost Cause mythology in a harsh new light. The result is an invigorating and eye-opening cultural history. (May)