My Old Kentucky Home: A Song History

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Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!" was issued by the New York publisher Firth, Pond & Co.; the first edition held by the Library of Congress is dated 1853, and its title page bills the song as sung by Christy's Minstrels.[1] Christy's was a blackface troupe, and shows of its kind traded in degrading stereotypes of Black people, staged for white audiences.[2] Foster's own sketchbook, now at the University of Pittsburgh, shows that the song began as "Poor Uncle Tom, Good-night!"; the associate director of Pitt's Center for American Music reads the drafts as Foster's first response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the nods to the novel stripped out in revision.[3] A Firth, Pond printing in the Pittsburgh collection numbers it 20 in Foster's series of "plantation melodies," and the song was often taken up in stage versions of Stowe's story, though sung by characters other than Tom himself.[4][5]

Ivy-covered brick front of Federal Hill in Bardstown, Kentucky

My Old Kentucky Home (Federal Hill), Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky. Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS KY-44). Library of Congress. No known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government. Kentucky tradition links the house to the song; the connection is reputed, not documented.

Kentucky tradition ties the song to Federal Hill, the Bardstown estate of Judge John Rowan, but the state's ExploreKYHistory site treats that link as reputed and, following historian Thomas D. Clark, suggests Foster may have dropped the Uncle Tom framing to make the song more saleable to Southern buyers.[6] Frederick Douglass, writing in My Bondage and My Freedom, took a more hopeful view, crediting the song with stirring sympathy for enslaved people and nurturing antislavery feeling.[7]

The General Assembly made it Kentucky's official state song on March 12, 1928, with Foster's original words intact.[7][8] In 1986 Representative Carl Hines, then the only Black member of the Kentucky House, sponsored a resolution that removed a racial slur from the lyric.[7][9] At Churchill Downs, the Derby's own history says the custom of playing it before the race is believed to date to 1921; since 1936, with few exceptions, the University of Louisville Marching Band has played it as the horses head to the gate, and in 2020 a lone bugler played it after a moment of silence.[10]

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Sources

  1. Library of Congress: "My old Kentucky home, good night!" (Firth, Pond & Co., first edition, 1853).
  2. PBS American Experience: "Performers and Artists".
  3. University of Pittsburgh: "Stephen Foster's Personal Sketchbook Now Online".
  4. University of Pittsburgh, Center for American Music: "My old Kentucky home, good night" (Foster's Plantation Melodies No. 20).
  5. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture (University of Virginia): "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night".
  6. ExploreKYHistory (Kentucky Historical Society): "Federal Hill – My Old Kentucky Home".
  7. Smithsonian Magazine: "The Complicated Legacy of 'My Old Kentucky Home'".
  8. Kentucky General Assembly, Legislative Moments: "My Old Kentucky Home" (state song, 1928).
  9. NBC News: "Kentucky Derby will play 'My Old Kentucky Home' despite criticism".
  10. Kentucky Derby (Churchill Downs): "My Old Kentucky Home".