Churchill Downs will continue its tradition of playing “My Old Kentucky Home” at the beginning of the Kentucky Derby races despite criticism of the song about American slavery.
But the performance of this tune, which is also Kentucky’s state anthem, will be different on Saturday than in previous years, Churchill Downs said.
“Normally, this moment should include singing along with the fans. This year, it will just go beyond the moment of invitation and reflection,” Tonia Abel, vice president of communications for the Churchill Downs Foundation, told NBC News in an email Saturday. .
The Kentucky Derby, with an average of 15 million television viewers per year in the U.S. One of the most-watched sporting events in, taking place on Saturday, was postponed to March due to a coronavirus epidemic, with fans not in attendance. (NBC broadcasts the derby every year.)
The song will be played by bugler Steve Buttleman, instead by the General University of Louisville Marching Band.
As a race track Tweeted on Friday“The 100-year-old tradition of singing Kentucky’s state anthem has been thoughtfully and correctly revised and will be preceded by a moment of silence and reflection.”
“My Old Kentucky Home” was written in the 1850s by Stephen Foster, a native of Pennsylvania.
His original songs tell the first-person story of a slave man sold down the river from Kentucky, “in an area where sugar-bamboo grows.” Subsequent versions tell a similar story in the third person.
According to Smithsonian magazine, the song, written in Foster’s form, “is indeed the lament of a slave man who has been forcibly separated from his family and has a painful longing to return to the cabin with his wife and children.”
“It presents a picture of slavery in Kentucky that is a beautiful, peaceful, positive one,” historian Emily Binghen told NBC-affiliated Wave in Louisville. “But then this guy, singing all the way about Kentucky, is transported into an environment where he’s going to meet death without ever meeting” with his family.
Later generations came to associate the song with planting culture and the Blackface Mystery show, Bingham said.
As its original anti-slavery meaning became less clear over the years, criticism of its influence grew, Smithsonian magazine reported.
The second line of the song, which included racial ambiguity that was repeated several times during the tune, introduced a resolution in the 1980s, after Carl Hines, an African-American legislator serving in the 43rd House District of Louisville, to destabilize the smell. The word “people.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-K, told reporters Friday that he had called the president of Churchill Downs and recommended that he play “My Old Kentucky Home.” “
“It’s a song that goes back to the pre-Civil War period. It had some language that I think could be seen as racially sensitive. It was abandoned 300 or years ago,” McConnell said. “It’s very much part of our culture and tradition and should be played fairly at the Kentucky Derby.”
Lewisville poet and activist Hannah Drake asked Churchill Downs about the song in an open letter this week.
“My old Kentucky home, as the song of a slave sold in the South, is still sung at the Kentucky Derby? … The people of this city of Brenno Taylor and those fighting for justice deserve more from this iconic organization,” he wrote, referring to the 26-year-old Black Emergency Room technician. He was fatally shot in his home on March 13 by Louisville police.
Thousands of protesters calling for justice for Taylor are expected to gather near the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, replacing Dandy Dandies and women, replacing the traditional crowds of Dapper Dandies and women who were absent from the stand due to the epidemic.
Chloe Atkins Contributed.
