Song lyrics to My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night by Stephen Foster (1853)

My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night! is an anti-slavery ballad written by Stephen Foster. It was published in January 1853. He was likely inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with imagery witnessed on his visits to the Bardstown, Kentucky farm of Federal Hill.

In Foster’s sketchbook, the song was originally entitled “Poor Uncle Tom, Good-Night!”, but he altered it to “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” Frederick Douglass 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”.