More Stories from Bob Dylan’s Instagram: Stephen Foster, Paul Robeson, and “My Old Kentucky Home”
What: “My Old Kentucky Home” recorded by Paul Robeson on September 11, 1930. Posted by bobdylan on Instagram March 13, 2025. (see below for the significance of that date).
Why: Those who think that Dylan’s Instagram videos are just rando posts from an 84-year-old (or maybe his 30-year-old grandson) should take a close look at many of the posts’ dates.
For example, March 13, 1931 was a significant day in Paul Robeson’s career, where he gave a well-received recital at the Duluth Armory in Minnesota. In a Duluth News Tribune interview on the same day , three years before his first trip to the Soviet Union, Robeson articulated his growing internationalist worldview and his affinity for the Russian people. He stated, “The music of the Russian and the Negro is fundamentally the same. The peasantry, the same oppression… All this has made me believe that the Russians, artistically at least, are my race.”
What else
Think of America’s cultural landscape as a palimpsest — a manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but where traces still remain. Few American artifacts reveal the layers of memory, myth, and meaning that is America’s history as powerfully as the song “My Old Kentucky Home” and the lives of the two men whose legacies are bound to it: its composer, Stephen Foster, and its best interpreter, Paul Robeson.
The song itself, which began as an anti-slavery lament to become a nostalgic anthem of the antebellum South, offers a lens through which to examine American identity and the capacity of art to both reinforce and challenge established order.
The Architect of American Song
Stephen Foster stands as one of the more paradoxical figures in American music. Dubbed “the father of American music,” he composed a soundtrack for the 19th-century American experience, with melodies so pervasive they have achieved the status of folk music. Yet, the story of his life is one of profound contradictions: a composer who sought respectability while profiting from the racist caricatures of the minstrel stage, and a national icon who died in abject poverty.
Despite the immense popularity of his music, Foster was a poor businessman. The profits from his songs, which generated tens of thousands of dollars for publishers and performers, largely bypassed him. In an act of financial desperation in 1857, he sold the rights to all his future songs to his publishers for approximately $1,900.
His personal life also unraveled. Struggling with alcoholism, he separated from his wife, Jane McDowell, and moved to New York City in 1860. There, his creative output shifted largely to sentimental ballads as he churned out songs for flat fees to survive. In January 1864, weakened by a fever, he suffered a fall in his Bowery hotel room, gashing his neck. He died three days later in Bellevue Hospital on January 13, at the age of 37. He left a legacy of over 200 songs, including the posthumously published “Beautiful Dreamer.”
The Life and Times of Paul Robeson
Paul Leroy Robeson was born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey. His father, the Reverend William Drew Robeson, was born into slavery in North Carolina, escaped to freedom as a teenager, and put himself through Lincoln University to become a respected Presbyterian minister. His mother, Maria Louisa Bustill, hailed from a prominent family of free Black abolitionists with Quaker roots who had been active in the cause of freedom for generations.
At age 17, Robeson won a statewide academic scholarship to Rutgers College, becoming only the third African American to attend the institution. At Rutgers, he was a phenomenal athlete, earning 15 varsity letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track, and was twice named a football All-American. He was also a star scholar, elected to the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Despite his status as a campus hero at Rutgers, Robeson was subjected to brutal racism. During his first football scrimmage, his own teammates targeted him, breaking his nose and dislocating his shoulder. Later, he was benched when the team from Washington and Lee University refused to take the field against a Black player.
After graduating from Rutgers, Robeson attended Columbia University School of Law, paying his tuition by playing professional football on weekends in the league that would become the NFL. However, Robeson’s plans of a legal career came to an end when a white stenographer refused to take dictation from him, stating, “I never take dictation from a nigger.”
Encouraged by his wife, the journalist Eslanda “Essie” Goode, whom he had married in 1921, Robeson turned to the theater. He had already appeared in amateur productions and found in theatre a realm where his talent could find fuller expression. His commanding presence and magnificent bass-baritone voice quickly made him a star of the Harlem Renaissance, with landmark performances in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings.
A Refusal to Be Silenced
Robeson’s fame exploded internationally when he starred in the 1928 London production of the musical Show Boat. His powerful rendition of “Ol’ Man River” became his signature song and made him a global celebrity.
His travels took him to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1934, an experience that would change his life. There, he felt he was treated with “full human dignity” for the first time, free from the racial prejudice that defined his life in America.
When Robeson returned to the United States, he brought his sharpened political consciousness with him, becoming one of the most outspoken and powerful critics of American racism. He led a crusade for a federal anti-lynching law, directly challenging President Harry S. Truman on the issue, and refused to perform before segregated audiences.
Robeson’s activism, combined with his unabashed sympathy for the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War, made him a prime target for the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. The FBI placed him and his wife under constant surveillance, a practice that would last for the rest of his life. In 1950, the State Department revoked his passport, barring him from traveling abroad to perform and effectively destroying his career and livelihood. His annual income plummeted from over $100,000 to just a few thousand dollars.
Despite being blacklisted and vilified, Robeson refused to be silenced. He resumed traveling and performing abroad to great acclaim, but the years of persecution at the hands of his own country had taken its toll. Paul Robeson died of a stroke in Philadelphia on January 23, 1976.
An Anthem of Contradiction
“My Old Kentucky Home” is more than just a song; it is a cultural battleground where the meaning of America’s past has been fought over for more than 170 years. It transformed from a poignant anti-slavery statement to a beloved, nostalgic anthem for the very plantation life it had originally critiqued, revealing the powerful ways in which cultural history can be manipulated and erased.
Contrary to its modern reputation as a sentimental ode to a genteel South, “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight,” as it was originally titled, was conceived by Stephen Foster in the early 1850s as a work of anti-slavery protest. Its creation was directly inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Foster’s own sketchbook shows that his initial working title for the melody was “Poor Uncle Tom, Goodnight”.
Joseph Byron, circa 1901
Source: Library of Congress (click on the link for identification and other information)
The song’s original narrative is a lament from the perspective of an enslaved person in Kentucky who is being sold “down the river” to the sugar cane plantations of the Deep South, forcibly separated from his family and home. The song’s political intent was recognized by one of the most prominent abolitionists of the day, Frederick Douglass, who wrote that Foster’s song was one that “awakens sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.”
The Lost Cause’s Lullaby
But by the turn of the 20th century, the song’s meaning had become perverted. The original verses detailing the narrator’s sale to the sugar cane fields and impending death were almost always omitted when performed. White audiences, hearing only the opening verse about “merry, happy” folk in their cabin, interpreted the song not as a story of Black pain, but as a nostalgic lament for a “happy home embedded in a glamorous portrait of life on the plantation.”
This revised meaning was adopted by both state and commercial interests. The song became an anthem for Kentucky tourism, with thousands of copies of the sheet music distributed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1928, at the height of the Jim Crow era, the Kentucky legislature officially adopted “My Old Kentucky Home” as the state song, cementing its sanitized meaning into an official symbol of state identity. To complete the myth-making, a Bardstown plantation called Federal Hill, which has no documented connection to Foster, was purchased by the state and promoted as the literal “Old Kentucky Home” that inspired the song.
Co-option and Change
In the latter half of the 20th century, as the Civil Rights Movement challenged the foundations of the Jim Crow South, the song once again became a ground-zero site of controversy. Objections grew, particularly concerning the use of the racial slur “darkies” in the lyrics. The Kentucky House of Representatives eventually passed a resolution to officially change the lyrics when the song was sung at all state functions, and the word “darkies” was replaced with “people.” While this removed the offensive slur, it also created a new layer of irony. By universalizing the lyric to “people,” the change further obscured the song’s focus on the African American experience and its original anti-slavery intent.
By the 1930s, the song had been almost completely co-opted as a nostalgic anthem for a fictional, genteel Old South. Most performers sang only the sanitized first verse, reinforcing the myth of the “happy plantation.” When Paul Robeson recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” on September 11, 1930 it became a deliberate and powerful act of historical and artistic restoration. Robeson sang the full, original lyrics, including the rarely heard verses about being sold south to die in the sugar cane fields. He did not change the word “darkies” and re-centered the song on the Black suffering at its core, forcing listeners to confront the song’s true meaning.
The journey of this one song — from Foster’s pen, through the distorting filter of Jim Crow nostalgia, to the restorative power of Robeson’s voice — serves as a powerful allegory. It reveals that cultural memory is not a passive inheritance but an active, political construction. It demonstrates how art can be used both to build and to dismantle the myths a nation tells itself.
In an ironic coda, the audio of Dylan’s Instagram post of Robeson’s performance of “My Kentucky Home” is no longer available, although the post and its comments remain on his account. A technical glitch? Censorship by an algorithm? Humans uncomfortable with the song’s original lyrics, including the the word “darkies?”
Meta didn’t respond when asked for comment.
Have a comment or question? Email me at fhbals@gmail.com
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