“My Old Kentucky Home” (“My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night”) has deeply entangled roots in America’s racist past, even though Stephen Foster initially wrote it as an anti‑slavery song inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853. Over time, however, its meaning flipped in popular culture, and it became associated with racist minstrelsy and romanticized plantation nostalgia.smithsonianmag+3
Stephen Foster titled the song “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night,” tying it explicitly to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti‑slavery novel. The lyrics originally tell the story of an enslaved person being “sold down the river” away from family, with lines such as “A few more days and the trouble all will end, in the field where the sugar cane grows,” highlighting the brutality of the domestic slave trade. In this early form, many scholars view the song as a humanizing lament that implicitly challenged the dehumanizing logic of slavery.npr+2
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the song was widely performed in blackface minstrel shows, where white performers in racist caricature sang only the first verse and chorus, stripping away the anti‑slavery message. In that context, the phrase “the darkies are gay” (originally “the darkies are gay”) came to evoke the stereotype of happy, contented enslaved people, reinforcing the “happy slave” myth. This presentation helped embed the song in Jim‑Crow‑era white nostalgia for the plantation South, despite its original, more critical intent.courier-journal+4
In 1986 Kentucky officially changed “the darkies are gay” to “the people are gay” in the state‑song version, explicitly acknowledging racial connotations as “not acceptable.” The song remains the traditional anthem at the Kentucky Derby, and its continued performance has drawn criticism from many Black Kentuckians and historians who see it as a celebration of a racist past. At the same time, historians such as Emily Bingham argue that the song’s deeper history is “complicated”: originally an anti‑slavery lament, it was later stripped of its context and repurposed for racial stereotyping.lithub+4