My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life & Reckoning of an Iconic American Song: Reading, Q & A, and Signing With Author Emily Bingham

Author Emily Bingham to Lead a Reading and Q & A Session and Sign Copies of My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Kick-off to Frazier Book Club, 1 p.m. (Book Club Members Only)

Public Event With Reading and Q & A, 2 p.m. (Free and Open to Public, Second Floor Classroom)

Book Signing in Museum Store, 2:45 p.m. (Free and Open to Public)

In the preface to My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, her book to be released May 3, Emily Bingham says “My Old Kentucky Home” was never just a song: Its full history needs to be told and its full powers need to be understood. Bingham’s book explores the journey of Kentucky’s state song, originally titled “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night.” Stephen Foster, a white man, wrote the song in the 1850s about a Black man being sold downriver. Bingham goes on to say this music has a past informed by thousands of performances, enactments, critiques, and defenses that, over time, encapsulate the United States’ contradictory and contorted relationship to slavery and white supremacy.

Save the date! Reservations will be accepted beginning Monday, April 18.

Copies of Bingham’s book will be on sale at the Frazier’s Museum Store.