The Louisville Anthology by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

When My Old Kentucky Home Was New to Me

AARON ROSENBLUM

I moved to Louisville, Kentucky around the first of May in 2005. On the sixth, a Friday and the eve of the 131st running of the Kentucky Derby, I performed for the first time as a member of a long-running Louisville music collective at a potluck and party on a small urban farm incongruously nestled between a golf course, a well-to-do subdivision, and an interstate highway. The instant invitation into the band, the welcoming atmosphere of the farm party, and the introduction that night to now-longtime friends all seemed to justify the fairly sudden and somewhat arbitrary decision I had made a few months earlier to leave my jobs and community in Massachusetts and move to Louisville. I don’t remember anyone at the party making much mention of that day’s Kentucky Oaks or the next day’s Derby, but I gathered that I had arrived in Louisville at a generally festive time of year.

The next day, a friend took me with her to a family Derby party held at her folks’ house in the suburban Fern Creek neighborhood. The weather was perfect, sunny and warm. As I would later find out is the custom, the festivities began hours before the race. Siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews played games, grilled, drank beer, and bet on the undercard races. I felt a little out of place but was made entirely welcome. Not to say I had moved to Kentucky with any great interest in the Derby, but I was glad to be invited and certainly didn’t want to miss out on the spectacle and the chance to observe the folkways of Louisvillians on their big unofficial holiday.

After the undercard races had been run, a change came over the gathering. Everyone assembled on the deck, where a television had been moved from inside the house so we could watch the race in the sunshine. Anticipation and celebratory tension—akin to the seventh inning stretch during a World Series game or the pause before the announcement of the Oscar for Best Picture—filled the space. I soon learned that this pre-race anticipatory gap would be filled not with “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” but with the state song, performed live at the track. As the song began I realized that not only were the crowds at Churchill Downs and gathered on the deck around me singing along, but that Kentuckians in their homes, at bars, and perhaps in exile all over the world, were simultaneously singing along to Stephen Foster’s 1853 ballad “My Old Kentucky Home.” Neat!

I knew Stephen Foster’s music from childhood music lessons, Looney Tunes, and any number of other sources of the American cultural canon that I had encountered in my then twenty-three years. If I knew “My Old Kentucky Home” at all, I surely didn’t know the lyrics by heart. So I listened rather than joining in, and heard something I wasn’t expecting and that I was totally unprepared to hear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.