As somebody who sings a lot of blues, I encounter this dilemma quite a bit, so I'll wade in.

To a large extent I agree with Joe Offer's approach — pick your audience for some songs, change some lyrics if it doesn't destroy the meaning of the song. After all, IMHO, the blues are as often about the HUMAN condition as they are about the BLACK condition. That's what makes them so lasting, so identifiable by all of us.

I also agree a bit with Jim Dixon — tho' I would quibble about who should or shouldn't be included in the "artist" categories. If I find a song that I really like for the tune, the instrumental work, etc., but which has words I would never sing in public — Victoria Spivey's "Black Gal" springs to mind, since I'm working on it at the moment — I use what I want out of it and rewrite the rest. That's part of the folk process, isn't it? When I perform one of those songs, I sometimes tell the audience that they might recognize the tune (or whatever), but somehow a white man singing
"Black gal, Black gal,
Why your nappy head so hard?"
just ain't gonna make it.

I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to substitute there, but I will substitute because I love the choppy, bouncy guitar work.

I have other songs I have to explain — which I agree can be boring if you lecture the audience, but can also be brief and save you enormous grief. A song that I have to do that on is — just coincidentally — called Black Girl. I tell the audience that when Josh White recorded it in the '50s, black technicians thought it was racist and wouldn't transcribe it from master tapes to records. Similarly, Leadbelly was booed off the stage by a black audience when he started singing the song. But the song has nothing to do with being black, except as a way of addressing the grieving widow. It's a lament — nothing more, nothing less.

As for the expurgated version of Huck Finn, it was performed here in Windsor a couple of years ago and the snippet of it I heard on CBC radio made me sick. If anybody has read Twain, they know he was arguing AGAINST racism, but to make it recognizable he had to use the racist words people of his day would understand. It seems to me a credit to him — and all others like him — that attitudes have changed as much as they have. I classify the people who want to "clean up" Twain's writing in the same category as a really stupid preacher I wonce had cover who wanted to expunge the Shakespeare texts used in high schools. But he wouldn't hear of cleaning up Song of Solomon in the Bible. Go figure!

cheers all,

david