My Old Kentucky Home

"My Old Kentucky Home"
Sheet music, 10th edition, 1892(?)
Song by Stephen Foster
Published	New York: Firth, Pond & Co. (January 1853)
Form	Strophic with chorus
Writer(s)	Stephen Foster
Language	English

"My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" is an anti-slavery ballad originally written by Stephen Foster, probably composed in 1852. It was published as in January 1853 by Firth, Pond, & Co. of New York. Foster likely composed the song after having been inspired by the narrative of popular anti-slavery novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin", while likely referencing imagery witnessed on his visits to the Bardstown, Kentucky farm called Federal Hill. In Foster's sketchbook, the song was originally entitled "Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!", but was altered by Foster as "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist, wrote in his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom that the song "awakens sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish".

The storyline in Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, is synonymous with the narrative of the song "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!"

In its entirety, the song contains three verses and one chorus repeated after each verse. The first verse of "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" describes an enslaved servant's description of the natural beauty and their feelings associated with a Kentucky farm landscape. The line that begins "By'n by Hard Times, comes a knocking at the door, Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!" acknowledges that the farm is experiencing financial hardship, and the verse suggests that the narrator knows they will leave the Kentucky farm as a result of being sold to settle the debt. The chorus of the song describes a presumptive longing by the narrator to return to the Kentucky farm: "Weep no-more my lady, O weep no more today. For we'll sing one song for my old Kentucky home, for my old Kentucky home far-away."