Harry Pickens Explains the Paradox of “My Old Kentucky Home”

I first heard about Harry Pickens when I was in high school. I remember how a friend of mine, after spending a few weeks during the Summer away at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, returned with an admiration for a specific faculty member. My friend told me it wasn’t because the teacher happened to be the most talented pianist she’d ever seen perform. It was more than that – my friend let me know that she’d never felt inspired like that before. 

I finally knew what she was talking about when I attended Kentucky to the World’s “The State of Song” program back in October. I thought I knew what to expect going into that event, as I understood Harry Pickens would join other panelists in a conversation about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.”

What I didn’t expect was how affected I would be by Pickens’ performance of the song I’ve heard more times than I can count. As he introduced the song and the program to the audience with cellist Ben Sollee, I felt like I finally understood how the song – from only a musical perspective – could remain so ingrained in our culture. 

At that point, I’d read so much about the exploitative, brutal context that produced the song and its inextricably racist composition, and I was stunned as I listened. This song opens real wounds for people, wounds linked to slavery and the persistence of Lost Cause nostalgia. The introductory, instrumental performance of the song was so wrenching that I began to feel strange, almost nauseous, even. And that was the point.

After the program, I knew I wanted to learn more from Harry Pickens. In an exclusive interview with Kentucky to the World, he shares how our culture’s devotions to artifacts like “My Old Kentucky Home” can be viewed as a symptom of a much larger problem – and how an educational refocusing can respond to it.

Blending Teaching and Music Performance

Harry Pickens wasn’t the first in his family to become a teacher. Born in Brunswick, Georgia, he recalls how his “mom was a teacher,” he told us, “and her sisters were both teachers. I grew up in a family of educators.” Even in high school, when he was the President of both Student Council and Band, he “was doing a lot of mentoring and teaching.” 

This unrelenting drive for academic excellence coincided with his training as a musician. “By the time I was in high school and then in college, I was absolutely thinking of performing and teaching as like two wings of a bird. You know, you can't fly with one. I would say it's been a central part of my vocational passion pretty much since I became a young adult.”

After graduating with a B.A. in Music from Rutgers University, Pickens landed a residency with the National Development for the Arts. In this capacity, he began to go into different school spaces to offer presentations and workshops. From there, he would go on to perform and collaborate with jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, and Joe Henderson, traveling through 17 countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Fragmentation in Education

At the same time that he became recognized widely as one of the premier jazz pianists in the world, Harry Pickens also cultivated a reputation as a forward-thinking, engaged, and compassionate educator. In both teaching and leadership roles for schools, colleges, and universities, he has supported countless students. 

For the past 20 years, Pickens has acted as Artist in Residence for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts. It’s been in this capacity that he’s witnessed an overall shift in how students learn. “I think the biggest issue is related to the advent of technology,” he told us. “When I first started teaching, there was no internet, if you can imagine that. There’s now this ubiquitous access to information, with constant distractions that are available that were not available before.”

Harry Pickens at the recording of Hannah Drake’s poem “Home”

These distractions are almost limitless in his view. “Whether it's a phone, a website, social media, Facebook, TikTok, whatever,” he said, “all of those create a kind of a cultural attention issue where we don't necessarily think as deeply about things.” He’s viewed this new dependence as profoundly consequential. “I think it's harder for younger generations to find a place of personal and emotional home,” he continued, “because there are so many things that are influencing them.”

“I think young people are growing up now in a much more fragmented world, and I think that impacts our functioning and what we value and how we live.”

The Paradox of “My Old Kentucky Home”

This fragmentation in our intake of information and our culture more broadly has made it a lot harder for educators to teach American history. KTW’s “State of Song” program aimed to explore how Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” comes out of and perpetuates a dangerous mythology.

Pickens focused on the countless contradictions in the song. “‘My Old Kentucky Home’ represents this quintessential paradox because, from a purely musical standpoint, the melody, the harmony, the form, the structure – it's absolutely a masterpiece. And without the words – if there were no words to it at all – it would still tug at the heart.” 

“The paradox,” Pickens elaborated, “comes from the context in which it was written and the social perspectives that it conveys, because that context is what we would consider reprehensible now.” The contradictions continue for Pickens: “That's the dilemma with the song, because Stephen Foster wrote it as a musician who needed to make money. And the way to make money at that time was with the minstrels shows. And a lot of his other songs didn't make as much money as his minstrel songs.” The cultural backdrop for Stephen Foster at best tolerated lyrics that celebrated slavery and at worst championed them.

But that’s not the most challenging aspect for Harry Pickens. “I think the real paradox of the song was not necessarily about Foster writing it or about the beauty of the music. It's about how people in the Kentucky business community, and Emily Bingham's book talks about this in detail, colluded to make the song representative of the state. And the moment that collusion happened, it made the paradox uglier, because it was no longer just a song. All of a sudden it was a state song which brought business and represented all these things to all these people.”

As a commercial enterprise, the song would become so deeply embedded in Kentucky and even American culture that its legacy would only continue to be whitewashed. More than that, though, Pickens’ “problem with ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ as it stands is that it was created in a time and a context where people were being literally sold down the river and raped and beaten and enslaved. And the lyrics speak to that, but it's all been distorted and glorified and made into a kind of nostalgia.”

Positioning “My Old Kentucky Home” as a Learning Tool

Pickens points to an unfortunate unwillingness in America’s educational landscape to explore the paradoxes in “My Old Kentucky Home” and American history more generally.

In schools across the country, “there's an attempt to eradicate context and to bury aspects of context behind closed doors,” Pickens offered. “So we never talk about them. And I think the answer to that is instead to provide an education that addresses complexity and context and paradox and contradiction.”

Context, for Pickens, is essential for students in understanding the different tensions and conflicts around Kentucky’s state song. For example, he suggested, “pretend you're Stephen Foster. He's this guy who realizes he has a gift for composing and realizes the way that he can survive the best is by bringing his compositional gift to what became the precursor of the American musical: the minstrel show.”

“Now, obviously,” he continued, “minstrelsy has a lot of bad things to it, because it created stereotypes of enslaved human beings and exploited them in horrific ways. At the same time, Stephen Foster, as a human being, was probably thinking, ‘Okay, well, I can ride this wave and it'll keep me from starving.’ If you look at that context, and you also look at the context of what was happening in the country with enslaved people and how they were treated right here in Kentucky, then you might begin to understand that no answer is a simple answer.” Even though the political landscape across the state and the country at large has grown more polarized, a renewed focus on context reveals that “there is no black and white” for Pickens. 

“My Old Kentucky Home” can have a palpable educational impact when considered more fully. “With ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ you have a magnificent song, a magnificent vehicle,” he said, “and you've also got lyrics that glorify enslavement and minstrelsy and this horrific stereotype that all the slaves are happy, gay, and joyful about their enslavement, which is a complete lie.”

Zoomed out, grappling with the song can also be seen as a model for how Americans can understand all of the contradictions in its history. “The only way out of all of America's dilemmas,” Pickens stated, “is finding a place for nuance, for complexity, for paradox, and for addressing both the light, the good, and the shadow.”

Kentucky to the World invites you to watch our most recent program “The State of Song: ‘My Old Kentucky Home Faces a Changing World” on Sunday, July 2 at 2pm EST on KET. Panelists Harry Pickens, Hannah Drake, Emily Bingham, and Ben Sollee discuss the problematic, disjointed legacy of “My Old Kentucky Home.”