Join us as author Emily Bingham discusses her book My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.
Free to all. Lunch will be served.
In My Old Kentucky Home, Emily Bingham explores the long, strange journey of what has come to be seen by some as an American anthem, an integral part of our folklore, culture, customs, foundation, a living symbol of a “happy past.” But “My Old Kentucky Home” was never just a song. It was always a song about slavery with the real Kentucky home inhabited by the enslaved and shot through with violence, despair, and degradation.
Bingham explores the song’s history and permutations from its decades of performances across the continent, entering into the bloodstream of American life, through its twenty-first-century reassessment. It is a song that has been repeated and taught for almost two hundred years, a resonant changing emblem of America’s original sin whose blood-drenched shadow hovers and haunts us still. — Amazon review