MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME

An author and historian with roots in Kentucky traces the fraught history of the song "My Old Kentucky Home."

Bingham interweaves several narratives in her exploration of American composer Stephen Foster’s famous song. The author traces the song’s history and how it evolved from a tale of an enslaved Black man to a sanitized, nostalgic look at plantation life. She follows the story of Foster, who died young but became known as “the father of American music.” Bingham chronicles how Kentucky’s identity evolved from that of a state whose soldiers fought mostly for the Union to one whose official song presents an elegiac portrait of Southern life. She plumbs personal reminiscences of her own family, from a Confederate ancestor to her crusading liberal father, who ran the Louisville Courier-Journal. Bingham delivers many sections of fierce cultural criticism of the White appropriation of Black music and laments how the song has become embedded in the psyche of Kentuckians. It’s a lot to hang on one song, and the results are mixed. Many readers will wish for a more in-depth musical analysis of what makes “My Old Kentucky Home” so compelling. Given the author’s privilege within an influential Kentucky family, some readers may be put off by implied criticism of Black leaders who endorsed the song and Black musicians who have played it. In this piece of her analysis, Bingham gives inadequate credit to the predicament of Black Americans trying to make their ways in a White world. This book is clearly a labor of diligent scholarship, conviction, and repentance for the author, who has apologized for her family’s slowness to respond to Black concerns when they owned the newspaper. Her conclusion that Black Americans decide the fate of the song should be the final word; only they can truly understand the weight of the history and what it means today.

A well-researched but uneven mixture of history, memoir, and cultural criticism.