Bellarmine Visiting Honors Faculty Fellow Emily Bingham has been awarded the 2025 Music in American Culture Award for her book,
My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song. The award, presented by the American Musicological Society, recognizes exceptional writing on American music in its cultural context.
Bingham's book traces the complex journey of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad, "My Old Kentucky Home," from minstrel tune to cultural touchstone, while examining the song's slavery roots. In bestowing the award, the American Musicological Society called the book "an unflinching look into the institutions and effects of slavery and anti-Black racism in the U.S., and a book that goes beyond the trope of music as reflecting these aspects of our culture, showing us how one song helped define and reinforce them over generations."
Bingham's book also received critical praise, with the Washington Post calling it "a powerful story of how we fool ourselves into thinking the past is past…Bingham’s authority as a needed writer of this book is undeniable.”
Bingham's previous books include
Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham and
Mordecai: An Early American Family.
To learn more about the book,
visit Bingham's website.