Gerth: Let's sing 'My Old Kentucky Home' as it was intended — in all its racist glory

“The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,

‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay.”

The words kind of slap you in the face.

They make you feel uncomfortable, even kind of dirty, just hearing them or reading them.

They did when the public address system started blaring them a couple of weeks ago at a Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce awards dinner in Western Kentucky.

Richard Abraham, the only African American member of the McCracken County Fiscal Court, sat down as soon as he heard the state’s song sung as Stephen Foster intended.

Gerth: Kentucky's state song 'My Old Kentucky Home' celebrates slavery. And it needs to go

“The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,

With sorrow, where all was delight,

The time has come when the d------ have to part,

Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.”

With that, the second slur of the beloved old song, the young Black man Abraham mentors who accompanied him to the event, realized what was going on and sat down too.

Maybe they should have taken a knee.

They left as soon as the song was over.

This wasn't Abraham's first run-in with the song.

When he was a senior at Paducah Tilghman High School back in 1979, he saw the sheet music on a piano in the choir room and was shocked by what he saw. "I’m reading and I’m like, "What?" At that point I decided I'm not singing that song again."

Abraham said what really bothered him at the chamber of commerce event was that no one stopped the music even though it went on for nearly five minutes and no one said anything after it ended. He received a text message after he left, apologizing.

The Paducah Sun reported about 800 people attended the event. Abraham estimated about 20 of them were Black.

The chamber of commerce president has apologized and told a Paducah television station it was just an innocent mistake and that someone had downloaded the wrong version of the song from a play list.

I used the actual word — as offensive as it is — because sometimes we need a harsh dose of reality to really understand. It's kind of like when it took pictures and video of police using dogs and firehoses to attack civil rights protesters to make people understand the racism Black people faced in the 1960s.

Maybe the original version of the song is the version we should all use.

At least until we finally get the gumption here to decide that a song that idealizes slavery in Kentucky — as opposed to the sugar-cane fields of Louisiana — probably shouldn’t be used as a state song at all.

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The last time the song made news because THAT version of it was used was in 1986 when a group of Japanese students touring the state belted out the original words while serenading lawmakers in the state House of Representatives. Later that same month, the legislators voted to sanitize the old lyrics and remove the racist words.

In fact, the song has been sanitized since Foster wrote it back in 1853.

In her book about the song, “My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song,” Emily Bingham traces the song from when Foster first wrote it in a dialect of a stereotypical slave in the years before the Civil War, but quickly rewrote in a “whiter” language for fear that the middle-class Americans who sat around playing and singing tunes as entertainment wouldn’t buy such low-class sheet music.

Premised on the story of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," Foster’s song became a hit, sung throughout the country by minstrel troupes and in plays based on the book, many of which helped spread the stereotypes of Black Americans.

It was written to be sung by white minstrels in blackface.

The song, like the novel, tells the story of a slave on a Kentucky farm who was “sold down the river” to a slave owner in the Deep South, where the slave is ultimately killed. On three occasions, as it was written, it uses a patronizing and dehumanizing term to refer to African Americans.

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"It's a horrible song," Abraham said. "There is nothing flattering about that song. If you're trying to move forward and heal, get rid of that song."

When he was a football player at the University of Kentucky, then-head coach Fran Curci asked him to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" at an alumni event. "I don’t sing that song," he recalled telling Curci. "I'll sing the national anthem, I'll sing some other song. But I don’t sing that song."

“The head must bow and the back will have to bend,

Wherever the d---- may go;

A few more days, and the trouble all will end,

In the field where the sugar-canes grow.”

In her book, Bingham said as a child she believed the song was about a bedraggled soldier returning home after the Civil War.

That wasn't by accident. Over the years, we tried to whitewash the words and the true meaning of the song.

At some point, “My Old Kentucky Home” quit being the old slave cabin that Foster wrote about and became the stately plantation home where the white people lived near Bardstown known as Federal Hill. It was built by slaves.

Then, the television and radio networks stepped in to do our job for us, rewriting the words of it and other old standards with racist language to remove the offensive words.

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U.S. Rep. Frank Chelf, of Marion County, opposed that for all the wrong reasons. He filed federal legislation in 1957 that would have prevented the networks from doing it.

"'My old Kentucky Home' is more than just a song, a tune; it is a ritual; it is an integral part of America; it is a part of her background, her folklore, her culture, her customs, her foundation, her very being," Chelf said in a floor speech.

We’ve shortened the song over the years to just the first verse, figuring that by doing that and removing the offensive language no one will notice what the song is about.

It’s about slavery. And the way we sing it — swaying, celebratory and (at the Kentucky Derby) often drunken — is just plain wrong.

Maybe the folks in Paducah got it right by mistake.

The only way we’re going to come to grips with the song and what it means is to stand up and proudly belt it out — in all its racist glory.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Why 'My Old Kentucky Home' should be sung in all its racist glory