"An Act of White Supremacy"
Louisville resident and historian Emily Bingham has a new book out called “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.” I”m not an expert on Kentucky or music history. But for me, the book was a real education—it’s a history of Louisville, Kentucky and post-Civil War America told through this song’s uses and misuses. It’s not a happy history. And Bingham isn’t shy in writing about the very fraught topics at play—including her own family’s complicated history around issues of race. (She is of the Bingham family that used to own the Courier-Journal.)
I talked to Bingham about the book and the song last week. Here’s a condensed, lightly-edited transcript of our conversation:
Perry: First of all, explain why “My Old Kentucky Home” is problematic, in terms of the lyrics and history of the song?
Emily: It’s an 1853 song. It's such an old song. That’s a very different time in America in some ways. It whitewashed the subject of the song itself. The representation of slavery in Kentucky, which the first verse does, as sort of everything is just hunky-dory and the birds are singing and the kids are rolling around playing and everything just seems great. It's summer, nobody's working hard. … That is just a problem.
Perry: So it celebrates or at least sanitizes slavery.
Emily: It sanitizes. Yeah. It whitewashes it. It makes it seem safe and comfortable. And there’s this vague thing that happens, this vague thing called the “hard times.” And then, oh, too bad, the person has to sing a love song to the people left behind. …. that wonderful place in Kentucky while he gets sold down river, and ends up in the cane field. …
This is something that broke millions of people's homes and hearts. Not to mention bodies in those cane fields. And so that whitewashing, that slavery could ever be a happy thing, is problematic.
How does this, how did a song that was about that [slavery] and that people knew was about that, become a song that people have no idea that it's about that or only in some very vague way–and it becomes celebratory?
Perry: There’s some dispute about all of this.
Emily: There’s an argument out there that this is an anti-slavery song. And I offer a bunch of retorts to that. No abolitionist movement or a person I've ever heard of had somebody in the Deep South wishing themselves into slavery in Kentucky. Or who would propose that a solution to slavery in America was to just enslave people in a place like Kentucky. That just doesn't exist.
There were actual abolitionists who used the tune of the song and had to write brand new words because the words as they existed did not promote their cause.
Uncle Tom was ubiquitous in the minds of Americans in 1852 and '53, when this song was being written, because of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, which was an anti-slavery novel. It's [the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin] been critiqued because it reproduced a lot of stereotypes along the way.
But even Uncle Tom in her novel was a young, strong, extremely faithful man.
And you know, even that stereotype has been abused. He's old. Stephen Foster, the first drafts of the song, he talked about “Old Uncle Tom, good night.” Isn't that interesting? Old Uncle Tom has almost the same number of letters as Old Kentucky Home. It's just kind of reversed. But he's made them old. Which is what white people did to black men through the ages to make them safe for consumption.
.Perry: So talking about Stephen Foster, the author of the song. Stephen Foster was not from Kentucky and spent very little time here, right?
Emily: He set foot in this state, it is documented, as a child, with his mom. And he rode a boat all the way from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, which means that he definitely saw Kentucky from the shore. He also worked in Cincinnati for a couple of years in the 1840s. That's where he wrote “Oh! Susanna.”
But what we do know is that he didn't spend any time, certainly not in the 1850s, in Kentucky, in Bardstown to write that song.
There's this specific myth that he came there and was so inspired by the beauties and natural and man-made setting, that he had to write this song to Kentucky. That's not true. This was written for blackface minstrel stages and hopefully to sell a lot of music because songs about old men wishing themselves back to plantations was something that people consumed in the 1850s.
Perry: He lived in Pittsburgh most of his life?
Emily: Almost his whole life except a short period in the 1850s in New York, and then he went back there in the 1860s and died in New York City.
Perry: Was the song nostalgic for people who lived in New York and Pittsburgh? (Areas where there wasn’t slavery by the 1850s.)
Emily: Yes. I think our culture is slowly coming to an understanding that it wasn't just The South. The South has much to answer for … But we’re learning how intertwined the economy and the culture of The North and The South were when it came to race.
We now are understanding about the banking system and how that lived off slavery as well, and the insurance system and on and on. And obviously, the Industrial Revolution in this country was deeply tied to enslavement.
But what I don't think people understand as well is the cultural side of that. We have the blackface minstrelsy, which was created by white people with images of black people as entertainment. And it was original and exciting for people.
And it was a creation of The North. It was a creation of urban centers, where people could go to theaters night after night and pay good money to be entertained. There weren't a lot of places like that in The South. … [Minstrels] really were the dominant form of American paying entertainment in the 1840s and '50s and 60s. And then with that transition, as you read, to Negro minstrels. … The repertoire stayed the same.
And now you could see, like, actual black folks do the songs that you've always loved and the plays that you've always loved. And it was because white people were controlling, running the show.
Perry: You mentioned Foster's family is Democrats, which in that period, that’s the pro-slavery party. So it again goes to the point that he's not an abolitionist.
Emily: I mean, if he were an abolitionist, he would have been very undercover about it, even within his own family. When [James] Buchanan was running for president [in 1856] Buchanan was the pro-slavery candidate in that race, [Foster] was an active member of the Buchanan Glee Club.
…For many years, while I was writing this book even or researching it, Wikipedia’s entry on “My Old Kentucky Home” started with the words, "An anti-slavery ballad."
Perry: Really?
Emily: But if you look at the way the song came about, the way it was used, the way it was incorporated into the culture, nobody was standing up thinking, "Oh, I just wanna testify about how bad slavery is here."
And certainly, by the 20th century, when it gets incorporated into the Kentucky Derby, nobody was saying, "Oh, we gotta get that song in there so that we can sing about how bad slavery was." No, it was representing a dream, what Thomas Clark, the historian, called “a dream of a happy past.”
He said it so beautifully. And he's sort of considered the father of Kentucky history. He did not grow up in Kentucky, and was like, "What, why are these Kentuckians singing this song?" It wasn't about sorrow. It was about something much more pleasant.
Perry: Talk about how the song around the start of the 20th century becomes part of Kentucky's lore.
Emily: Stephen Foster wrote this song, he's a professional songwriter, to try to make some money. That’s what he does. That's his work. That’s something we need to keep in mind, that there's an economic aspect to this song. It's not just a nice song, right?
And the reason it has been able to be alive as long as it has is because it has continued to generate income for various parties.
So about the turn of the century, this is the time of Plessy versus Ferguson, this is the time of disenfranchisement across The South. This is the time when lynching is beginning to become an immense problem, where hundreds of people are being subjected to that every year. And it is the time that historians have identified as this period of reconciliation and reunion, where people who fought for the Union and people who fought for the Confederacy are ready to say, "Let’s let bygones be bygones and move forward together as one nation. And if that means black people don't get to exercise their constitutional rights, so be it.”
So at that time in Kentucky, Kentucky is struggling. Kentucky has been a poor state for a long time. And it was a poor state in 1904. In 1893, when they had the World's Fair and the famous Chicago World's Fair, they were so poor and disorganized and no one really got it together to even have a Kentucky exhibit.
So come the next chance to showcase the state to the outside world, the white men who were running things here said, "You know, we're not going to let that happen again. We've got to do better." And they organized a campaign to promote Kentucky in St. Louis for the World's Fair that was held there. And so they built this big Kentucky— it's called the Kentucky building.
“Kentucky Home, It’s Part Mine” was their slogan.
They built this big white mansion, very Southern, very, very elaborate. And they had Stephen Foster's song playing every single day, all day. I think it was 17 different versions that they had … The idea was hospitality, the idea was The South, the idea was pretty music that everyone kind of knew from decades of it being sung on minstrel stages. And it worked.
People would come in and see that you could mine in Kentucky and you could do agriculture, and there were horses, and there were schools and all the things that they wanted to show.
They [Kentucky leaders at the time] saw it as a way to get over some of the ugly, really ugly things that were going on in Kentucky. So beyond this poverty, you had violence, you had feuding in the Appalachian region. Or at least that's what people would read about in the newspapers.
You had lynchings which weren't so great either for the state's reputation. And you had political violence on a scale that was unique—a governor-elect was assassinated on the Capitol steps in 1900.
This was an image that needed repair. So they found a solution.
And my argument is that it took a little while for that to really get institutionalized. It took a decade or two. And that was done with these interesting homecomings and ceremonies and sculptures and fundraisers around Stephen Foster himself. We end with this actual tourist attraction, the Old Kentucky Home.
Perry: Talk about Kentucky and the Civil War. Like in some ways, we were a more pro-Union state that decided after the war to join the Confederacy, right?
Emily: We never officially joined the Confederacy here in Kentucky. White leadership was strongly pro-Union. …We did have people, especially in central Kentucky, where slavery was a larger part of the economy and culture, who joined the Confederacy in larger numbers.
[But eventually] Leadership within Kentucky politically pivots toward ex-Confederates. They become the governors, they become the representatives, …even in Louisville, they become socially and culturally powerful, dominant in some ways. And that's why we had a Confederate Memorial and not a Union Memorial built here in Louisville, which was a deeply-Union City.
Perry: There's also just a desire to make Kentucky about something as a state.
Emily: In the 1920s ….like the song is more famous than the state is on some level.
Music is something ... anyone who loves music knows you take this stuff in your heart. If you feel it, you feel it. And not everyone loves the song, but a lot of people really have felt the song.
Perry: So there was always some wariness about the song. You tell a great story about Lyman Johnson in the book.
Emily: Lyman Johnson was a civil rights pioneer and educator. He desegregated University of Kentucky by entering their law school after court cases had to be filed and fought for years to allow him to do that. But he was a teacher at Central High School, which is where Muhammad Ali went to high school and many, many others and was the first black high school in the state of Kentucky. And he was just adamant. He was like, "Kids, you know, this song is just another version of the white men telling lies about history. It talks about the happy plantation. We're not gonna do that."
Perry: At the end of your book, you should suggest black people should decide the future of the song’s use.
Emily: Well, I wouldn't use the word should ….But I think that the future of the song, what future it has, where it is played and when and under what circumstances is something that after 170 years of white people controlling should be something that is controlled by people who don't look like me.
Perry: Tell me how that works in practice. Is there a committee? I'm just curious, it's an interesting idea.
Emily: What if we asked that the song only be performed by black performers when they want to do it, when and where they want to do it.
Perry: So they may never want to sing it.
Emily: If they wanna, do it, if it works for them, fantastic.
‘…Churchill Downs is a private corporation. They have their own governance structure. They could read the book …. and maybe consider what they want to do. But they are a white-controlled space. And I just would submit that has been the long history of this song, a white product that has benefited white folks emotionally, financially, branding for a state that’s been controlled by white folks.
And when it comes to the legislature, I would suggest, you could convene a committee of black Kentuckians who could study this history. They could go back to Lyman Johnson and the NAACP and talk to leaders today. And they could be from all across this state. They could submit a report to the legislature about what the song means and has meant to them and how they think it does or doesn't represent the best interests of this state … to the world and to itself.
Perry: I’m reading from the final chapter of your book here. “Whatever Black people choose to do with ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ does not change what I know now: its public performance in spaces led and controlled by white Americans is, by definition, an act of white supremacy, whether done consciously or unthinkingly. For me, singing and celebrating Stephen Foster's song is no longer possible. For me, “My Old Kentucky Home” is unredeemable.”
Unredeemable?
Emily: For me, that's my personal choice. I don't want to sing that song anymore. I think it has educational possibilities. I'm not saying it should be erased from history. It is history. In fact, it's so much history that is the history of white folks thinking that they're seeing something happy when they're seeing one of the saddest chapters in our history. So that is history. That is our history.
There's just nothing that makes me want to continue to see it embraced and enshrined and institutionalized as it has been and as it remains in 2022. …. So I can't enjoy it, I can't feel happy when I hear it, I can't feel moved in a positive way.
It makes me angry.
But I also understand, Perry, that I have had six full years of researching this as a white person. And I've had many years before where it was bothering me. I knew it was wrong. I knew there was something at work here that I didn't fully understand. That was uncomfortable.
And it came to the point for me … that I wanted to do something about it. I'm a historian. I write books, I research, I try to get under what has been forgotten or just isn't known. So I'm not blaming somebody else. But I do think we need to understand that our actions and our traditions can speak in ways that we don't intend, that we don't know. Because cumulatively, they have a message. And in this case, I think it's a message of constantly being okay with something that wasn't okay. Slavery wasn't okay.
It’s not the fault of any one person. It's not. But it does take actions, conscious ones, just as it took a conscious action to put this song where it is, to unravel it. To unravel and allow us to make decisions about whether we continue those traditions, or whether we have other ones that we can embrace.