Kentucky's State Song Trivia Quiz

Answer:

The official state song, "My Old Kentucky Home", is easily one of the darkest and most complicated state songs in America - and considering we have Maryland's coming up...Woo Boy...That is saying something.

The song was written in 1853 by Stephen Foster, who is often called the "father of American music". Every year, more than 150,000 cheerful sports fans belt out the tune at the Kentucky Derby, thinking it is just a sweet, nostalgic ballad about beautiful summer days and singing birds. But if you have taken these quizzes in order, then by now you must at least suspect that that ain't true. The song's actual backstory is a deeply tragic story about the horrors of slavery.

Foster was heavily inspired by the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his first draft of the song was titled "Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night". The track is written from the perspective of an enslaved man in Kentucky who has just been forcibly separated from his wife and children. He is saying goodbye to his cabin because his master is selling him down the river to the Deep South. While the first verse sounds peaceful, the later, now rarely-sung verses describe the man preparing for a brutal life of forced labor and an early death in the scorching heat of the sugarcane fields.

The song also has a history which is somewhat problematic. For over a century, it was a staple of blackface minstrel shows, where white performers painted their faces in imitation of black people in a manner which is now regarded as deeply offensive. The original lyrics also used the word "darkie" instead of "people" in the opening verse - "Tis summer, the [people] are gay".

Back in 1928, this wasn't an issue when the state of Kentucky officially adopted it as the state anthem. Even so, the legislature did not step in to legally scrub the racial slurs from the official text and replace them with the word "people" until 1986. In fact, strangely, it was a group of Japanese schoolkids that prompted the change when they showed up on a school trip to Kentucky and sung the full lyrics. A black legislator complained, not surprisingly, and proposed a formal resolution changing the lyrics to what we have today.

"My Old Kentucky Home" has really become a bizarre historical paradox: a song meant to condemn the cruelty of slavery that accidentally became a cozy anthem of southern nostalgia.