Do You Know What You're Singing?

This state song of Kentucky is performed at the start of the annual Kentucky Derby.  But, do you know what it is you are singing?  “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” was originally written for minstrel singers. The song is narrated from the perspective of a slave who is being sold south because his Kentucky plantation master has gone bankrupt. All of the other slaves on the plantation are sent to freedom, but this slave sings that he will long for his “old Kentucky home” when he is sold to a southern plantation.

Stephen C. Foster's family supported slavery, but some scholars now argue that he changed his views on slavery in the early 1850s, which makes this suggestion that the southbound slave will fondly miss his Kentucky enslavement very puzzling. Also, it’s a minstrel song, intended for white actors to sing in blackface – anything but progressive.

So what was Foster thinking? He was originally from Pittsburgh, but he frequently visited his cousin, John Rowan, and his wife, Ann, at their property in Bardstown, Kentucky. It was at this Kentucky farm that Foster gained his first-hand exposure plantation life. Foster’s song was released in 1852, the same year as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Foster initially entitled the tune “Poor Old Uncle Tom, Good-Night!” but finalized the title to “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” as we know it today.

So as you sip on your mint julep on Saturday, ponder the irony of your “Old Kentucky Home.” To see the sheet music, ask for William/Watson SF 30.

Posted for Regan Roberts '16.

Commerce and Communism

Patronage is complicated. It's especially complicated when you're a member of a Mexican communist artists' collective but you live in a capitalist society, so you need money to continue your quest to inspire revolution.

Enter Mexican People, a portfolio produced around 1947 by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, the People's Graphics Workshop). The TGP was established in 1937 by a group of Mexican leftists who wanted to create art that reflected the daily struggles of the Mexican people.

Leopoldo Méndez, "Grinding Maize"

In 1947, the TGP faced a crisis -- they needed money, and they turned to the United States. Associated American Artists was an American gallery established in 1934 to provide affordable art to the middle class, primarily in the form of prints such as lithographs. The TGP created Mexican People, a portfolio of twelve signed lithographs, for an audience in the United States that was hungry for "authentic" images of Mexico.

As students in Professor Coffey's art history class on Mexicanidad (Mexican Identity) pointed out last week, Mexican People creates an ambivalent vision of Mexico. Are the images of backbreaking work (quarrying, grinding maize, rolling logs down a river) celebrating the culture of Mexico and the indomitable spirit of Mexicans? Or are they a critique of capitalism?

To see it, ask for Rare Book NE2314 .A8 1947.