Can We Talk About Stephen Foster?

Emily Bingham is a historian whose current project is a song biography that explores the meanings and uses of Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight” from 1853. The melody has remained in the public ear for well over one hundred and fifty years and still evokes nostalgia—its evolution is entangled with the history of race and whiteness in America. Bingham, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, holds a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught at Centre College, University of Louisville, and Bellarmine University. Her previous books include the prize-winning, Irrepressible: The Jazz-Age Life of Henrietta Bingham and Mordecai: An Early American Family, about a southern Jewish clan. 

Ken Emerson is the author of Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture and Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, editor of Stephen Foster & Co.: Lyrics of America’s First Great Popular Songs, and co-editor of Rethinking the Urban Agenda: Reinvigorating the Liberal Tradition in New York City and Urban America. 

The former articles editor of the New York Times Magazine and op-ed editor of New York Newsday, he has written for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal.
 
A longtime consultant helping nonprofits develop effective branding, communications and fundraising strategies and materials, Emerson is currently senior editor at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.  

Emerson earned a BA from Harvard and an MA from Yale, both in English, and taught at Princeton as the first recipient of the Philip Anschutz Distinguished Visiting Fellowship in American Studies. 

Rachael Gilkey is director of programming and education at Irish Arts Center, where she has worked since 2008. Prior to IAC, she served as development manager at the Battery Conservancy. She currently serves in a volunteer capacity for the Bronx Book Festival. She holds a master's in Irish studies from National University of Ireland, Galway, and graduated cum laude from Occidental College. She was awarded the Irish Echo Top 40 Under 40: Irish American Young Leaders award in 2012. She lives with her family in Queens.

Photo credit: Rich Gilligan

Mick Moloney, IAC artistic associate, holds a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught ethnomusicology, folklore, and Irish studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, and Villanova Universities, and currently teaches at New York University in the Irish Studies program.

Multi-instrumentalist Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton’s credits include performing to a sold out audience at the Lead Belly Tribute at Carnegie Hall in 2016, with artists including Buddy Guy, Eric Burdon, Edgar Winter, Kenny Wayne Shepherd; opening for Buddy Guy at B.B. Kings in New York and Robert Cray at the Reading Blues Festival in Pennsylvania; and playing at Woodford Folk Festival and Byron Bay Blues Festival in Australia; Calgary Folk Festival in Canada; Jewel City Jam in Huntington, WV; Freihofers Jazz Festival in Saratoga Springs, NY; Clearwater Festival in Croton-on-Hudson, NY; Fayetteville Roots Festival in Fayetteville, AK; Cambridge Folk Festival in the UK; Harvest Time Rhythm & Blues Festival in Ireland; and the 2017 Brooklyn Folk Festival as headliner.

Paxton was featured on CNN's Great Big Story and appeared in the award-winning documentary The American Epic Sessions, produced by Robert Redford, Jack White, and T-Bone Burnett. In October and November 2018, Paxton will tour the U.S. with fellow musicians from this production. His sound is influenced by the likes of Fats Waller and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson.

"Virtually the only music-maker of his generation—playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements—to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and ‘30s"—Wall Street Journal

Artist and historian Lenwood Sloan has collaborated with Mick Moloney for almost four decades on cultural/artistic exchanges that have spanned the globe from Limerick to San Francisco and from Harlem to Havana. They have co-presented at a variety of important colloquiums including the highly-acclaimed Re-Imagining Ireland. Benchmark works include Black, White and Green in Harlem, Two Roads Diverge, and the Irish Arts Center Winter Solstice Celebration at Symphony Space, where Junkanoo met Strawboy for holiday revelry.

Sloan is recognized for his prolific portfolio of creative works including national tours of 13 Lessons, a play about adult illiteracy; The Vo-Du Mac Beth, voted one of the “10 best plays of the New South,” and The Creole Mass, commissioned by the late Ambassador Lindy Boggs for New Orleans St. Louis Cathedral. His work for the New York stage include Her Talking Drums and Williams and Walker for Off-Broadway's American Place Theater, The Wake for the New Federal Theater, and Sweet Saturday Night for Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Sloan participated on the artistic team of four national public television documentaries: Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, Ethnic Notions, Stephen Foster, and Dance Black America. He also served as period movement specialist for the film 12 Years a Slave.