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How does a song about slavery become a beloved melody, a celebratory anthem, and an integral part of American folklore and culture?

The state song of Kentucky since the 1920s, sung each May before every Derby as the horses step onto the track for the post parade, “My Old Kentucky Home” has inhabited hearts and memories in perpetual reprise.

Written by Stephen Foster nine years before the Civil War, the song had a decades-long run as a national blackface minstrel sensation, marketed Kentucky to tourists, was referenced in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and sung on The Simpsons and Mad Men. It has been recorded as an American standard in both high and low cultures, by the bass baritone Paul Robeson, son of a former slave, and by Marian Anderson, contralto singer of opera and spirituals and the high priestess of American musicians; by Al Jolson, Russian-American singer, comedian, actor, vaudevillian, known as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer” at his peak and, by modern critics, as “the racist king of blackface performers;” by the ultimate baritone crooner, Bing Crosby, entertainer of millions, as well as by Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Shore, John Prine, Johnny Depp, and Lyle Lovett; even George Burns, Mickey Rooney, and Looney Tunes star Bugs Bunny have sung its nostalgia-steeped words.

My Old Kentucky Home unearths performances, recordings, and protests, tracing one song’s entrance into the bloodstream of American life and through to its twenty-first century reassessment. This revelatory account of how a melody can be so memorable but also so formed by forgetting is a story for a country yearning for healing.

Click here to listen to the full 1853 lyrics

“People who love the song say there is . . . a kind of serenity, a sweet longing for something lost over the passing years, even if they cannot put into words what that something is. How this came to be, 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 . . . knowing its beginnings and long, tortured journey into a third century of painted-over suffering, [Bingham] reckoned that it did not belong to her, but to those wounded most by it; they should decide its future.”—Rick Bragg, The New York Times

“A beautiful book. I was taken aback by how the song and its history, and Foster’s own history, are so much a part of our ongoing story. Bingham’s writing is compelling, and humbling, and moving.”—Rosanne Cash, singer, songwriter, and author

“A powerful story of how, exactly, we fool ourselves into thinking the past is past . . . 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. Shirley Temple, Colonel Sanders, the country of Japan, Henrietta Vinton Davis, J.K. Lilly, Marian Anderson, Richard M. Nixon, the 31W Highway, “Mad Men”—and yes, the Kentucky Derby—are all summoned . . . 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.” —The Washington Post

“Beautifully written . . . deeply personal . . . riveting . . . a love letter — but one with tears in the eyes — to the Commonwealth of Kentucky… [that] has a serious and important national reach.” —Louisville Courier Journal

“Thoughtful . . . intensely moral . . . [Bingham] covers a spectacular amount of ground, from the origins of the song before the Civil War up to the present day . . . Engrossing twists and turns come with every chapter.” —Chapter 16

“Immersive and well-honed . . . [Bingham] astutely analyzes the song’s reinterpretation by Black artists and activists . . . an invigorating and eye-opening cultural history.”—Publishers Weekly

“Bingham asks readers to think critically about a song cherished by many and to consider the price of nostalgia .”—Library Journal

“Emily Bingham has painstakingly created a history quilt out of the intricacies of the profound effects of a single song on American culture. The result is wonder and dismay—and a lesson for today in how propaganda works… She delves into some of the deepest issues America has ever faced, issues that are still unresolved. This book is not simply about lyrics of a song but how that song has been used to tell a lie.”—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and Dear Ann

“One song, in Emily Bingham’s brilliant hands, brings history and memory together in ways all Americans must confront if we are ever truly to hear one another.” —Timothy Tyson, author of the New York Times bestseller The Blood of Emmett Till

“A song is not just a song in Emily Bingham’s My Old Kentucky Home. She tells a personal and passionate history of how a song revered in her home state has been understood and misunderstood for generations and what it says about America’s continued struggle to understand race. Her writing is as lovely as the song’s melody; her argument is as jarring as its lyrics.”—Joe Drape, author of New York Times Bestseller American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise.

“This is transformative work. Bingham has composed and engrossing narrative that reminds us that rarely is a song just a song.” –Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

“My Old Kentucky Home” has been performed and recorded hundreds of thousands of times. We cannot hear how blackface minstrels or families in 1850s parlors sang it when it was a new hit, but follow the link below for a selection of interpretations of the song through the decades.

Emily Bingham is the prizewinning author of three books and lives and teaches in Louisville, Kentucky.

She grew up a few miles from Churchill Downs, where her grandfather took her as a child and taught her to bet the races. Hearing Stephen Foster’s melody each spring when watching the Kentucky Derby on TV was just another component of a thrilling day. As an adult, after graduate school in history, she looked up Stephen Foster’s lyrics. “My Old Kentucky Home” was about slavery. What is to be done with a sonic monument sung into American culture over generations? With the life-story of a single popular song up to its twenty-first-century reassessment, she directly engages, and sometimes encapsulates, the complexity of memory and race in the United States.