Stephen Foster’s greatest hit
At a college party in the late 1970s, the late University of Pittsburgh professor of economics David B. Houston groused over a plastic cup of wine about the grinning, barefoot, banjo-playing “darkie” at the foot of the preposterously noble Stephen
Foster statue. He wondered how such an offensive statue could stand unmolested for so many years, right out in the open on Forbes Avenue next to the Carnegie Museums and Library.
Too bad Emily Bingham, the author of “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an American Song,” wasn’t at that party. She’d have gone to town.
Bingham grew up near Churchill Downs, where Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” was a staple of Derby festivities and pretty much everything else related to the marketing of the Bluegrass State. Her grandfather’s grandfather had been a respectable teacher, a slave owner and a night rider with the Klan. Who better to take Foster’s inordinately popular song and, through it, unweave the fabric of minstrel shows, the American Civil War, Jim Crow, the sheetmusic industry, Al Jolson, “Gone With the Wind,” Pearl Harbor, KFC, Black Power, University of Kentucky basketball at Rupp Arena, hip-hop, Muhammad Ali, COVID-19 and John Prine?
The tale begins in 1852 in Pittsburgh, a steamboat owned by Stephen Foster’s brother, a cruise down the Ohio to the Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans, docking at Louisville for the revelers to stretch their legs. It is a time when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is the news of the day.
“Sometime after the riverboat journey,” Bingham writes, “Stephen composed a yearning melody in a somber adagio tempo with a lump-in-the-throat chorus.” Foster had drafted “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night.” According
to Bingham, Foster re-created “the peaceful opening scene on a Kentucky plantation” straight out of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Published in 1853, the song title became “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night.”
Over time, Stowe’s abolitionist novel became fodder for stage shows with mixed messages, some proudly racist and others less deliberately so. Likewise, Foster’s songs were interpreted differently. Frederick Douglass, for example, famously detested minstrelsy but thought it possible that Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” might succeed in softening hearts and leading whites to think more compassionately about their dark-skinned brethren.
Foster himself was torn. Not known to have actively supported the efforts of Frederick Douglass, Foster did attempt to “red up” his work for polite society, correcting the dialect-spellings to conform to standard English. Minstrel music was decidedly low-brow, coarse and crude. Foster wanted respectability. He didn’t live to see it.
Bingham has big a problem with Foster’s “inauthentic authenticity.” African American artists hoping to make a living on stage frequently added Foster tunes to their shows to provide something familiar for the tastes of their audiences, lending credibility to a musical tradition that, in fact, has more in common with European than African music. Compare “Oh Susannah” to Ma Rainey and you’ll hear for yourself.
Entertainerswant to make a living. Audiences want to laugh, cry and forget. Emily Bingham wants a reckoning. Well, at least we got rid of that damnedstatue.
Robert Andrew Wagner is the author of “Red Beets & Horseradish,” the latest album by The Little Wretches.