” Normally, the minute would include fans singing along. This year, it will be critical just and preceded by a moment of silence and reflection,” Tonya Abeln, vice president of interactions at the Churchill Downs Foundation, informed NBC News in an email Saturday.
The Kentucky Derby, one of the most-watched sporting events in the U.S., with an average of 15 million television audiences each year, is happening Saturday without fans in participation after it was postponed in March since of the coronavirus pandemic. (NBC televises the derby each year.).
The song will be played by bugler Steve Buttleman, instead of as normal by the University of Louisville marching band.
As the racetrack tweeted Friday, “the 100-year tradition of singing the state song of Kentucky has been attentively & & appropriately customized & & will be preceded by a moment of silence and reflection.”.
” This is a tune that goes back to the pre-Civil War period. “Its a very much a part of our culture and custom and definitely should be played at the Kentucky Derby.”.
Louisville poet and activist Hannah Drake asked Churchill Downs about the song in an open letter today.
” Why is My Old Kentucky Home, a tune of a slave being sold down South, still sung at the Kentucky Derby? … Breonna Taylor and those in this city defending justice deserved more from this iconic organization,” she wrote in reference to the 26-year-old Black emergency medical technician who was fatally shot by Louisville Metro cops in her house on March 13.
Thousands of demonstrators requiring justice for Breonna Taylor are anticipated to collect near the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, replacing the conventional crowds of dapper dandies and ladies in fanciful hats who will be absent from the stands because of the pandemic.
Nicole Acevedo.
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Chloe Atkins contributed.
Later generations concerned associate the tune with plantation culture and blackface minstrel programs, Bingham said.
As its initial anti-slavery meaning ended up being less apparent for many years, criticism of its performance grew, the Smithsonian Magazine stated.
The second line of the tune that contained a racial slur that was duplicated several times during the tune was changed in the 1980s after Carl Hines, the first African American state lawmaker to have served Louisvilles 43th district, introduced a resolution that would substitute the slur for the word “individuals.”.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Friday that he called the president of Churchill Downs “and advised that they play My Old Kentucky Home.”.
Churchill Downs Racetrack will continue its tradition of playing “My Old Kentucky Home” at the start of the Kentucky Derby regardless of criticism of the tune about American slavery.
The performance of the tune, which is also Kentuckys state song, will be different Saturday than in previous years, Churchill Downs stated.
” My Old Kentucky Home” was written by author Stephen Foster, a Pennsylvania native, in the 1850s.
Its initial lyrics tell the first-person tale of a shackled person being sold down the river from Kentucky to strive in “the field where the sugar-canes grow.” Later versions tell the exact same story in third person.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the tune as Foster wrote it “is in fact the lament of a shackled individual who has been forcibly separated from his family and his agonizing longing to return to the cabin with his better half and kids.”.
” It provides an image of slavery in Kentucky that is a lovely, serene, favorable,” historian Emily Bingham told NBC affiliate WAVE in Louisville. “But then it carries this individual, whos sort of singing all the way about Kentucky, into an environment where they are going to fulfill death without ever being reunited” with their household.
