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

Abstract

Reviewed by: My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song by Emily Bingham Craig Thompson Friend (bio) My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song. By Emily Bingham. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. Pp. xx, 329. $30.00 cloth; $14.99 ebook) If the singing of “My Old Kentucky Home” at the Kentucky Derby or a University of Kentucky football game or other public events has ever brought goosebumps or a tear to your eye, read this book. It is a book about how our ancestors crafted and used historical memory, whether in the form of a song, a lost cause, a historic site, or an absolute belief in American progress that allows us to continue to sing a song about enslavement because such horrors are in the past. It is also a book about reckoning as “an act of hope,” as Emily Bingham concludes in her exceptional study of one of the most iconic songs in United States history (p. 229). We live in an age of reckoning, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and probably most importantly, our ancestors’ inability (or refusal) to acknowledge and solve the inequalities those legacies created in a nation founded on the premise of equality. We have witnessed much of this reckoning in public ways: the dismantling of Confederate monuments, the removal of enslavers’ statues and names from federal institutions, and the publication of The 1619 Project (2019). Not just the public, but historians, too, have questioned how history-making, as an endeavor, contributed to myths that caused, and continue to cause, more harm than good. In Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010), Anne Marshall visited the monument mania that overtook Kentuckians in the late nineteenth century as they crafted a memory of the Civil War that did not fit their realities, making Kentucky “southern” in the process. Now, we have Bingham’s study of “My Old Kentucky Home”—a song written to make a quick dime through white performers in [End Page 197] blackface as they mocked Black Americans and altered to appeal to more genteel audiences so that they would buy the sheet music. It was employed to create nostalgia around a lost cause that few Kentuckians had experienced, was sung by Black performers who knew success relied on concession, became part of a canon of “exotic” southern fare with the rise of Hollywood movies, found itself attached to a historic site that had no connection to it or its author, and became so sentimentalized that the commonwealth uncritically adopted it as its state song. Her study is so thorough that it is difficult to imagine what Bingham might have overlooked in the research, and her writing is simultaneously inspiring and provocative. As a Kentuckian, Bingham lived with and relished the sentimentality of “My Old Kentucky Home.” This book is more than a history of the song, however. It is a memoir of her journey toward enlightenment about the song, and why, although it still holds a place in her memories, it can no longer hold a place in her heart. Bingham draws her own ancestors—people who enslaved others, who perpetuated racial segregation and oppression, who bought into the mythology of the Old Kentucky home—into the story, and with good reason. The history of a song is more than a dispassionate objective narrative, it is the story of how each person hears and remembers that song. Although some readers may bristle at the myth-busting, Bingham offers readers the opportunity to weigh for themselves the harsh realities of history and the sentimental comforts of a fabricated past. Ultimately, that is Bingham’s purpose, to empower Kentuckians, particularly Black Kentuckians, to reconsider “My Old Kentucky Home” in their history and mythology. “I don’t believe it can be wrong to love a song,” she contemplates, “but I do believe we commit wrongs when we do not understand what we claim to love” (p. 229). [End Page 198] Craig Thompson Friend CRAIG THOMPSON FRIEND teaches history and public history at North Carolina State University. He is co-author of The New History of Kentucky, 2d. ed. (2018) and...