Posted on 05/07/2022 9:50:50 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
The controversy behind Kentucky’s state song is again brought to light, this time from a member of one of the most prominent families in Louisville history.
Emily Bingham picked the lunch spot for our interview, and the choice of restaurant was smart and shrewd on her part.
We slid into a booth at Wagner’s Pharmacy, a century-old place in Louisville’s South End that has transitioned over the years into a no-frills diner and gift shop. It is located across the street from Churchill Downs, feeding horsemen and racing fans soup and sandwiches and eggs and bacon. The place is a shrine to the sport, and to the Kentucky Derby specifically.
This was the perfect—and perfectly cheeky—location to discuss Bingham’s new book, My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song. It is an unflinching, brilliantly written study of the song that is synonymous with the Derby—the one that will bring as many as 150,000 horse racing fans to their feet at Churchill on Saturday, many with tears in their eyes, as they boozily sing along to Stephen Foster’s 1853 tune.
How many of those 150,000 know that “My Old Kentucky Home” is steeped in racism? Whitewashed and inauthentically presented as Southern sentimentalism? Packaged as a paean to soft-edged nostalgia, when in reality its lyrics tell a tale of a slave being taken from his family and sold downriver to die on a sugarcane plantation?
It's not just that racist terms for Black people had to be changed to “people” in the latter half of the 20th century, in varying stages by various institutions, to make the singing more palatable. It’s not just the second and third verses, rarely sung, that paint an increasingly bleak picture of a displaced slave’s existence. It’s more than that.
(Excerpt) Read more at si.com ...
They’ve managed to ruin that too. :-(
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Style/model-leyna-bloom-sports-illustrateds-1st-transgender-cover/story?id=78942693&msclkid=3a50791fcec511ec899b7a9120f9258a
What a beautiful voice he had. Also, the song has always reminded me of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” now I know why. Since Tom was a Christian and faced his trials faithfully, I guess that gives the leftists another reason to hate the story and the song.
Merriam Webster has the gall to define “darky” in their racist dictionary. It, and all other dictionaries, should be banned.
= = =
And remove “N” from the alphabet. More to follow.
Finally, all communication will be Zzz zzzzz z zz zzz (oops, did not capitalize the pronouns).
It is just a matter of time before they put a muzzle on the Statue of Liberty—to make sure she does not say anything racist or put out “disinformation”.
:-(
Instead of hitting on lyrics written to a beautiful tune 170 years ago they should rap about the tuneless lyrics being written today.
GOOD FOR CHURCHILL DOWNS.
History is history.
Everything that is negative that blacks PERCEIVE has happened to them cannot be blamed on a song.
Welfare has allowed millions of layabout persons to proliferate. They cannot take care of themselves & are more demanding than feral cats.
I have a bunch of songs by Sons of the Pioneers. They do a bunch of old traditional songs like “Old Kentucky home”. They use term ‘darkies’ in the several different tunes. I was driving with a friend and one of those came on. He looked at me and asked “did they really just say that”? Yup. says I, the line was “darkie picks the cotton, but white man makes the money”. It was truth, and not prettied up. Of course it was recorded in the 30s or 40s, so kinda predates political correctness.
It appears to me that Foster wrote a protest song against the injustice of slavery. He used the word “darkies”, which is certainly offensive today, and may very well have been to abolitionists in his time, but it WAS a commonly used word (or worse) by the supporters of slavery.
I think of Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” protest song, where he sings “Sent me off to a foreign land, to go kill the yellow man”. Similarly racist language, but it is employed to make the point that the song writer is opposed to it, not in support of it.
Rap is crap, full of misogyny. Where are all the so-called feminists to condemn this garbage?
Let’s just go the absurd since we can beat them there: Ban black people for being black, that’s racist!
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