I also learnt Foster's songs (not Anglina Baker or Hard Times) & was told he was the father of American folk music. His take of the plight of the slave was common & he helped it along, next came Jim Crow and then the white minstrials doing black music, that the blacks didn't do yet, & all the time their culture was getting expolited. I've never heard a slave song, a camp leeve song, a prison worksong that was as gentle as Joe or full of kindness & longing for the good ole days as Foster would have it. His songs diffinitly have their place in our history, not because it didn't have slurs & not because it's not a negro spritual (religious escape from oppression), it has it's place beside Jim Crow & his mint jewelip(sp?), alongside of John Brown's body it's real place has been buried for yrs. under the notion that antebellum south was good to the white lipped nigger who knew no better & cared not, as long as they were singing (whistle) while they (you) work (ed). Very little, culturally black, survived, pre & post slavery, & to portray Foster's music as representing a tradition (on no not this traditional thing again) would be an insult to any that remotely have any connection to it's history. The Leeve System along the Mississippi & it's branches took more material & labor than the Great Wall of China, where is the written or oral history or the music of this feat, the black cleared the land & opened the waterways, the south prospered on the back of the black & buried him in a turnrow without a marker in history of the bat of an eye. Foster may not have directly been inoffensive but if you have to ask if the slave loved their master....... I wouldn't say it's all PC. Barry