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AAGGKY - My Old Kentucky Home (virtual)
About this event
Join the AAGGKY 3rd Saturday series with Emily Bingham presents...My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.
Register here for the zoom link.
"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. In this presentation, Bingham will provide an overview of the iconic song’s origins and its path to becoming a powerful part of Kentucky’s culture and brand. For this meeting of the AAGGKY, she will also detail the unexpected role a group of accomplished Indianapolis African American singers (part of the Kentucky Black diaspora) played in cementing Stephen Foster’s place in the American songbook.
Meet EMILY BINGHAM
Born in Louisville, Kentucky into a journalism family, Emily early on decided she wanted to write. Among her grade-school efforts was a poem inspired by the typewriter her father gave her as a child, and on which he typed bedtime stories as he told them. Her poem, “Typewriter,” weighed the options—poet, novelist, journalist. The opportunity to dig deep into the past to tell true stories that shine a light on how we got here came later when she caught the bug for archival research and enrolled in Chapel Hill’s US history doctoral program.
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