Thousands sing song about slavery at Derby

“In the world of sports,” promises the official website for the Kentucky Derby, “there is not a more moving moment than when the horses step onto the track for the Kentucky Derby post parade and the band strikes up ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and 160,000+ people sing along.”

The tradition of playing the song on Derby Day dates back until at least 1921, although it’s not clear when it became part of the parade of horses and jockeys at the start of the race at Churchill Downs.

“Since 1936, with only a few exceptions, the song has been performed by the University of Louisville Marching Band as the horses make their way from the paddock to the starting gate,” the Derby’s official history explains.

The crowd at the Derby sings along — a scene always captured by the television broadcast of the race. Many people belting out the lyrics have no idea that the history behind the song is so fraught.

“My Old Kentucky Home” is the state song of Kentucky. It was written before the Civil War by storied American songwriter Stephen Foster, who is considered the “father of American music.” The song has made appearances in Gone With the Wind and The Simpsons and been recorded by everyone from Al Jolson and Bing Crosby to Marian Anderson and Louis Armstrong.

But last month the city of Pittsburgh, Foster’s hometown, removed a controversial statue of him with a black man sitting at his feet, singing and strumming the banjo.

The 800-pound statue, created in 1900 by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, had been a controversial monument at Schenley Plaza, with critics saying it “glorifies white appropriation of black culture, and depicts the vacantly smiling musician in a way that is at best condescending and at worst racist,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Defenders argued that it simply showed Foster listening to a song by a black musician.

Foster, who wrote minstrel music now seen as racially offensive, is remembered for “Oh! Susanna,” “Hard Times Come Again No More” and “Old Folks at Home” (or “Swanee River”).

“My Old Kentucky Home” was different. It is a lament by a slave who has been sold by his master and, bound for the Deep South, must say goodbye to his beloved birthplace. It hints at the brutal mistreatment he faces: “The head must bow and the back will have to bend … In the field where the sugar-canes grow.”

In a 2010 interview with NPR, music critic Ken Emerson, who wrote a biography of Foster, said “My Old Kentucky Home” was inspired by the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“Ironically,” Emerson said, “here is a song that was inspired by a great abolitionist novel, and which no less a leader then Frederick Douglass himself singled out as a song that awakens the sympathies for the slave . ... So, like all of Foster’s music, it’s thick with contradictions that, to this day, I think, are part of the American experience.”