Readings: A curated look at the best things to read this week
A Kentucky Derby Week special: Five pieces to get your racing shoes on.
There are birds chirping outside my window as I write this reminding me that Spring has come and it seems like it’s been away for a very long time.
Last spring was a horror show: Schools closed, churches shuttered and everywhere businesses hanging out signs that read, more or less: “We’ll see you in the fall, we hope.” Even the Kentucky Derby got postponed to a spectator-free September sideshow.
Well, some of us have survived — and not just the birds. Things are improving.
The Derby is back where it belongs in 2021, on the first Saturday of May and maybe that’s what’s put the zip back into my step. How about you?
In Bourbon Story, we’ll be regularly offering our take on the best things to read about, for or by Kentuckians – so let me kick off this first edition of Readings with a look back through the years to some of the best things written about the Derby. I’d love for you to add to this list with comments about your own favorites.
1. The Biggest Week in Bourbontown. You’ll forgive me, but this is one by me, commissioned in 2013 by the whip-smart editors at Roadsandkingdoms.com. You can decide whether it belongs in this excellent company, but I put it here because it still resonated with me. I wrote most of it in a kind of haze as I flew from California to Washington to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner a few months ahead of starting my new gig as business correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. The highlight of the weekend was not the dinner, but rather a reunion with boyhood pal Nathan Bishop, a bourbon fan and as I’d learn over the next few years an excellent drinking companion. My continued thanks to Barbara Allen, Kevin Hyde, Dr. Allen Helm, and the late Kevin Morrice for use of their memories to greatly enrich this story.
2. Kentucky: May: Saturday. William Faulkner’s 1955 classic for Sports Illustrated. It’s not like any sports story you’ve read before. And how about these two for opening sentences?
THREE DAYS BEFORE
This saw Boone: the bluegrass, the virgin land rolling westward wave by dense wave from the Allegheny gaps, unmarked then, teeming with deer and buffalo about the salt licks and the limestone springs whose water in time would make the fine bourbon whiskey; and the wild men too -- the red men and the white ones too who had to be a little wild also to endure and survive and so mark the wilderness with the proofs of their tough survival -- Boonesborough, Owenstown, Harrod's and Harbuck's Stations; Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground.
And knew Lincoln too, where the old weathered durable rail fences enclose the green and sacrosanct pace of rounded hills long healed now from the plow, and big old trees to shade the site of the ancient one-room cabin in which the babe first saw light; no sound there now but such wind and birds as when the child first faced the road which would lead to fame and martyrdom -- unless perhaps you like to think that the man's voice is somewhere there too, speaking into the scene of his own nativity the simple and matchless prose with which he reminded us of our duties and responsibilities if we wished to continue as a nation.
3. The Derby, by Laura Hillenbrand. The author of Seabiscuit wrote this in 1999 for American Heritage magazine. It tells the story of the Derby and its host track, and the way both had to fight for survival again and again before becoming the icons they are today.
The Derby is the supreme hour of a supreme creature, a moment in which most falter and one transcends. It is not the richest race, not the longest, nor the fastest, but for many it is the only race. Wrote John Steinbeck: “This Kentucky Derby, whatever it is—a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion—is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced.”
4. Horseman, Pass By: Glory, grief and the race for the Triple Crown, by John Jeremiah Sullivan in Harpers 2002. This one will break your heart. It also includes some vivid scenes that might just change your perspective on things you thought you knew well.
DARKNESS
It is worth reading the complete lyrics of the song itself, “My Old Kentucky Home,” one of Foster’s most famous. They are not at all what you think. The “darkies” are not really “gay”—not even in the song, I mean. Foster is toying with you there, seeing if he can get you to take out your hanky. Legend has it that he composed the song during a party, a “gay ball” at an old country home, amid dancing belles and beaus. We must picture him there, jotting down the last verse on the back of some sheet music while he pretends to listen to some drunken son of a landowner talk about how his family’s darkies have no complaints:
The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go:
A few more days, and the trouble all will end
In the field where the sugar-canes grow.
A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter ’twill never be light,
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky Home, good-night!
”No matter ’twill never be light.”Few lyrics, outside the early blues and British heavy metal, could match that one for hopelessness. The Derby commissioners should make the crowd sing the whole thing, rather than bowdlerizing one line.
Several of Foster’s songs were hits in his lifetime, and he was able to negotiate a royalties deal with a New York music publisher. But he was an alcoholic of cosmic dimensions and drank himself into such chronic debt that he started selling off the rights to his compositions for a few dollars apiece, then spending those dollars on beer.
He died in a Bowery hotel in January of 1864, while the Civil War raged. He had been in bed for days with a fever, his wife and child having long since left him. In the early morning he rose to call a chambermaid for help, but he swooned, gouging his head on the washbasin next to the bed as he fell. He was found hours later by George Cooper, one of the only friends he had left. Cooper described the scene:
Steve never wore any night-clothes and he lay there on the floor, naked, and suffering horribly. He had wonderful big brown eyes and they looked up at me with an appeal I can never forget. He whispered, “I’m done for”, and begged for a drink… We put his clothes on him and took him to the hospital.
Foster died three days later. History has recorded his possessions at time of death: In his tattered leather purse were thirty-eight cents and a scrap of paper on which he had written, in pencil, “Dear friends and gentle hearts.”
5. The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson. The Return of the Native in 1971, an occasion for score-settling by the author, a Louisville outcast, and the happy invention of Gonzo journalism. It’s a tale of humor, excess, exaggeration and penetrating insight. This version is an annotated look by the late and lamented site, Grantland. (Added bonus, Bourbon Story caught up with artist Ralph Steadman a few years ago to talk about Thompson, whom the artist first met during the 1971 assignment in Louisville. Writer Kevin Hyde took at look at this classic piece for Bourbon Story Magazine in 2014.)
“Oh yeah?” He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. “Is that what you got there — cameras? Who you work for?”
“Playboy,” I said.
He laughed. “Well goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of — nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you’ll be workin’ pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That’s a race jut for fillies.” He was laughing wildly. “Hell yes! And they’ll all be nekkid too!”
I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the riot.”
“What riot?”
I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.” I stared at him again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”
The grin on his face had collapsed. “What the hell are you talkin about?”
“Well … maybe I shouldn’t be telling you … ” I shrugged. “But hell, everybody seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They warned us — all the press and photographers — to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting … ”