Camptown Races. Stewball. 

Stewball Was A Racehorse.    ???  i.e. I don't know if the gist of it would honor (?) the K.D.   [Edit: Ooops ... I see I'm slow on the draw, a.k.a. editing. ]

The tunes "Grey Eagle" and "Wagner" (now usually "Wagoner") were named for rival champion racehorses.

Here is a discussion that may be helpful.  Which version and where it actually came from may not be all that definite.

http://americanstrings.blogspot.com/2012/01/grey-eagle.html#:~:text=A%20Scottish%20tune%20named%20“Miller,a%20part%20in%20this%20mystery.

The all-knowing (?) Google comes up with a quite a few for "songs about racehorses."

"Molly and Tenbrooks" -- Mike Seeger's old-time version -- fiddle & banjo.
"Barney Google" -- the Sparkplug verses. (Spoiler alert: Sparky lost.)

Note: Mike's version is called "Tenbrook and Molly" and is on his magisterial American Banjo Styles CD. 

My Old Kentucky Home is a "racehorse song?"

And then there's the Irish classic "The Galway Races" (cf. The Dubliners).

quote:

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Originally posted by lanarkbanjo

can anyone think of horse racing song to play in honor of the upcoming Kentucky Derby? I can only think of Molly an Tenbrooks and My Old Kentucky Home

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More Dutch connections - Tenbrooks was named after horeseman Richard Ten Broeck ("broeck"means "pants" in Dutch)  who was from a prestigious Albany, NY family.  John Harper, a Kentucky horse breeder who owned Tenbrooks, named him ; he was friends with Richard Ten Broeck. I wonder if Bill Monroe, whose grandparents were of the Vandiver (Dutch) family, knew about that. 
"When did Monroe's family move to America?

Nobody mentioned his mother's family (still 50% of his ancestry).

"The Vanderver or, as originally written, van der Veer family originated from the city of Veere, province of Zeeland in The Netherlands. 
That would make him of Scots/Dutch ancestry.
He confirmed this in a radio interview when he played over here in the 1970-ies."

Tennessee Stud-

quote:

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Originally posted by Joel Hooks

My Old Kentucky Home is a "racehorse song?"

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It is sung at the opening of the Kentucky Derbby

Tractor1,

There's no evidence in the lyric of the song that the Tennessee Stud was ever engaged in competitive racing. He was just an equine lothario.

he "raced his horse with a spaniards foal"--Wayne but no problema us kentuckians need to watch each other

I always thought wagoner came from Wagoneer as the driver of a wagon team--but not sure where I got that idea maybe Ira Ford's fiddle tune book-I'll have to run that down

''Let her go God bless her'' Louvin brothers -- mentions betting at the track

“The Race is On”

I started making my own playlist that includes a lot of these songs, One I found and didn't see included was Going To The Races by The Country Gentlemen (1973) or by Old & In The Way (1997) which is about as bluegrass as it gets.

How’s ‘bout “Bucking Mule”, “Flop-Eared Mule”, “A Horse With No Name”, or Claire Lynch’s “If Wishes Were Horses"

Did not know this was horse related until this a.m.
From Wikipedia:
"The Yankee Doodle Boy", also well known as "(I'm a) Yankee Doodle Dandy" is a patriotic song from the Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones
written by George M. Cohan. The play opened at the Liberty Theater on November 7, 1904.
The play concerns the trials and tribulations of a fictional American jockey, Johnny Jones (based on the real life jockey Tod Sloan), who rides
a horse named Yankee Doodle in the English Derby. Cohan incorporates snippets of several popular traditional American songs into his lyrics of
this song, as he often did with his songs.
The song was performed by James Cagney in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which he played Cohan

"Blue Mule" by Peter Rowan. It's on an Old & in the Way record.

Frank Sinatra's, Can-Do.
"I got the horse right here. His name is Paul Revere. . . . " etc. etc.

here's another by Chet Atkins

I'm not sure but maybe... "Riding the Danville Pike" by Blue Highway?