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

"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingh...