How the song so captured these people and a wider world, is the haunting question that the native Kentuckian Emily Bingham answers so thoroughly and forcefully in My Old Kentucky Home, her history of an American song ... This book is more than just a kind of archaeological deep dig; it attempts a reckoning, a kind that many Southerners, especially, will recognize and understand, because they have long been searching for something like it themselves ... The song is a thing from antiquity, yes, but in 2022, in an America at war with itself, this book seems to arrive just in time. Bingham, in her words, scrubs off some of that burned cork to see what is underneath ... Her book offers its readers the same choice, between understanding and sweet nostalgia, between the splinters and thorns of history and about the worst thing people can do to one another, and a smooth, thin, polished veneer.
Emily Bingham’s new book offers a powerful story of how, exactly, we fool ourselves into thinking the past is past ... Bingham has given us an account that is both riveting and thorough, taking us across a century of spinout marketing campaigns, protests and versions that emerged from Foster’s lyrics ... Before Bingham’s done, she will argue with powerful momentum that the song 'is a spy hole into one of America’s deftest and most destructive creations: the "singing enslaved person" whose song assured hearers that the plantation was happy and a place where Black people belong' ... People who are devoted to provocative hot takes will probably accuse Bingham of canceling a standard perceived to be an anthem for the American Dream. But Bingham’s research is finely detailed, extensive, complex. Further, her identity — and its many complications — is vital to her authority as a needed writer of this book ... What makes us so afraid to learn? What makes a person, a family, a country afraid of veracity? Emily Bingham’s new book is a work toward truth and reconciliation ... Ignorance, she intimates, is not an option for the patriotic.
[A] thoughtful, self-aware, intensely moral history ... Covers a spectacular amount of ground ... Engrossing twists and turns come with every chapter of the book ... The tremendous range of My Old Kentucky Home might threaten to spin out of control were it not for the clear moral center drawing it all together. Here the stories of attempts by Black people to find some use for Foster’s song across time lend the book needed intricacy.
In her carefully researched and beautifully written new book, historian Emily Bingham examines American slavery and its after-effects in the context of Stephen Foster’s 'My Old Kentucky Home' ... She intertwines it with deeply personal insights about her own evolution on racial issues as a historian by training and education, as a descendant of enslavers on both sides of her family ... Riveting ... It forces one to think carefully about Kentucky’s official state anthem and at a deeper level, it forces one to confront personal and societal racism ... Bingham deftly analyzes the making of at least four interrelated myths that have arisen from slavery through the lens of the ballad ... Because her personal and family experiences in so many ways parallel the song, this book can be characterized as a love letter — but one with tears in the eyes — to the commonwealth of Kentucky. The book also has a serious and important national reach.
Drawing from extensive research and personal experience, Bingham explores the history of Stephen Foster’s 'My Old Kentucky Home' ... Bingham unravels the false narratives that were created around Foster’s song in the 20th century ... Bingham asks readers to think critically about a song cherished by many and to consider the price of nostalgia; she concludes that one can love a song and still relinquish it as a symbol of hope or compassion ... Bingham convincingly argues that listeners cannot disconnect 'My Old Kentucky Home' from its fraught and dishonest history and that the only way forward is to stop performing it altogether. Readers familiar with the song will get the most out of this book, as will anyone with a deep interest in the intersections of music and history.
Immersive and well-honed ... 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.
