9780593590188
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My Old Kentucky Home audiobook

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My Old Kentucky Home Audiobook Summary

The long journey of an American song, passed down from generation to generation, bridging a nation’s fraught disconnect between history and warped illusion, revealing the country’s ever evolving self.

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man, considered the father of American music, about a Black man being sold downriver, performed for decades by white men in blackface, and the song, an anthem of longing and pain, turned upside down and, over time, becoming a celebration of happy plantation life.

It is the state song of Kentucky, a song that has inhabited hearts and memories, and in perpetual reprise, stands outside time; sung each May, before every Kentucky Derby, since 1930.
 
Written by Stephen Foster nine years before the Civil War, “My Old Kentucky Home” made its way through the wartime years to its decades-long run as a national minstrel sensation for which it was written; from its reference in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind to being sung on The Simpsons and Mad Men.
 
Originally called “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!” and inspired by America’s most famous abolitionist novel, it was a lament by an enslaved man, sold by his “master,” who must say goodbye to his beloved family and birthplace, with hints of the brutality to come: “The head must bow and the back will have to bend / Wherever the darky may go / A few more days, and the trouble all will end / In the field where the sugar-canes grow . . .” 
 
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.

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My Old Kentucky Home Audiobook Narrator

Emily Bingham is the narrator of My Old Kentucky Home audiobook that was written by Emily Bingham

About the Author(s) of My Old Kentucky Home

Emily Bingham is the author of My Old Kentucky Home

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My Old Kentucky Home Full Details

Narrator Emily Bingham
Length 10 hours 37 minutes
Author Emily Bingham
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date May 06, 2024
ISBN 9780593590188

Subjects

The publisher of the My Old Kentucky Home is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: civil rights, civil rights books, culture, my old kentucky home, song writing books, songwriting book, songwriters on songwriting, father, marriage, new books, music notes, song, fathers day, dad book, anthem, slavery, economics, business, saga, politics, race, art history, art, political books, memoirs, autobiographies, law, feminism, biography, history book, history books for adults, black history books, civil war books, history books, history, songwriting, music books, music book, music theory, sing, Music, kentucky, writing music, Social Science, Discrimination & Race Relations, Music, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs The BISAC Subject Code is Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science

Additional info

The publisher of the My Old Kentucky Home is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593590188.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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