Ok, katjuststating. I am retrenched now, my ears stinging from the boxing, so let me try again.

There is a fine line between evolving a song in the interest of better communication (slipping a you in where a thou once stood, or removing "nigger" for bano because oif the change in context since those days.

I can be empathetic, and words change meaning, sop there is fine judgement line to be cleaved to.

But, for example, there are a slew of songs portraying the age-old problem of unwanted preganancy resulting from mutual unstopped passions. A large number of them include a rerally psycho solution wherein the stronger of the couple, usually the male, takes the weaker of the couple out of sight and ends their life.

A few examples are "Polly, Pretty Polly", "The Banks of the Ohio", and the one I think of as "Burglar's Wine", properly called something else. These portray a very rough vignette, one which would be very uncomfortable to many people today, apparently glamorizing violence (by commemorating it in song) not to mention misogyny.

I won't sing these songs to someone who is over-tenderized to the point of thinking that doing so is offensive. But I would remind such a person of the time frtame in which the songs reside. And I would be damned if I would rewrite them to make it seem they played jacks in the woods instead of murder.

Here's a couplet from a Civil War song:

When our good old flag, the Stars and Stripes, from Sumters walls was hurled
And up above on the forwardest wall the Rebel flag unfurled
It aroused each loyal Northern man and caused his blood to boil
To see that flag -- Secession's Rag -- float over Virginia soil

There are similar couplets from the same era denouncing the abrogation of STate's Rights by the Federalists, which was the core issue of the Civil War.

Either one of the two could cause offense. For example, there are large numbers of people recently stirred up because they believe (incorrectly) that slavery was the core issue of the Civil War. Obviously they would be offended by a song that called for Hurrah's for the Bonnie Blue Flag, even though that song states cxlearly it is about Southern rights, not about owning humans. It is understandable that the two issues get mixed up. But it does not, to my mind, justify stripping them of their original intent.

I often sing the Unreconstructed Rebel, with its funny and somehow stirring last line:

I won't be rconstructed, an' I do not give a damn.

I have always felt that knowing these songs was somehow a proof against Big Brother's effort to rewrite the past, burying the passions and often the wisdom of history. I don't believe that knowing and singing them reduces ethical consciousness, any more than it promotes murdering pregnat girlfriends. In fact quite the contrary. It portrays the past agonies well enough to make them stand out as lessons learned). That's one of their values.

All this is the rationale behind my argument that a song laid down in its own time has its own honor. I know and enjoy the evolving process that produces new songs and new versions but it is one thing as an organic process, and another as a Grundy-esque effort to cover up the less admirable parts of our collective history. I suppose the intent makes all the difference, and I cannot come up just now with any clear definition that would otherwise differnetiate between the two infallibly.

At the same time I do not believe in forcing people to think about anything they really can't handle, except in emergencies. Ah, me, what a quandary.

A