I've never seen since I've been born a big buck nigger with his sea boots on

If you sub sailor for nigger it doesn't take from the song, the word was offensive not the content of the song. Ol Black Joe & the like had offensive themes & were propaganda of an oppressive society. Is this the only type of music that survived of those times. Can anyone rattle off the titles of songs by & about Blacks from the same period. Gone are the happy days, the days when my heart was young & gay, when I bounced some white kid on my knee after my own child was torn from my arms & sold or beaten in those pretty cotton fields. If you think this was about a gentle old dying slave thinking back on friends in the field & what a wonderfull life he'd had to resign himself to you missed the turn. I don't think Foster was insenitive, just ignorant, & was probly a victum of his own society, but he documented that society in his songs as did the Nazis in their treatment of the Jews (see earlier thread on Nazis treatment of Jewish songs). See Why Live Music, an oppressor starts by denying the oppressed of their culture, music is one of the first to be altered or denied, then language & beliefs. Would any say that the film that Hitler had taken of the Nazi terror, if done by a great or famous film maker a pice of art or masterpiece or the doctumention of a society gone mad. If the comparison is heavy handed, it's not that it's far fetched only sutle. Who was left to sing for the native Americans. Barry