This is not exactly the issue Morwen is talking about, but I think the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess fits into this discussion well. Wikipedia says the first live performance was in 1935, with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. It was based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy and his subsequent play Porgy and Bess, which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothy Heyward. All three works deal with African-American life in the fictitious Catfish Row (based on the area of Cabbage Row) in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.

Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina and was a descendant of Thomas Heyward, Jr., who was a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of South Carolina - so I'm guessing Heyward was white. The play was written in "Negro dialect" (or the white conception thereof). The first movie production of Porgy and Bess was in 1959, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, and Diahann Carroll. Poitier and Dandridge did not do their own singing. As I understand it, the movie was terrible, particularly because it portrayed racially-stereotyped characters in a time when racial issues were becoming heated. Blacks were portrayed as oversexed, good-for-nothing gamblers who couldn't do "honest work." My understanding is that the Gershwin family disliked the movie so much, that the family did not allow its reissue on videotape or DVD.

A second movie was released in 1993, produced by BBC with a cast of unknown actors. I saw this production, and I really liked it. If was more of a televised stage play, not a full-blown movie. I'm getting a little hard of hearing, so I watched the movie with subtitles. What I found particularly interesting was that the subtitles were in "dialect," but the actors used only a hint of so-called dialect. For the most part, they spoke and sang in Standard American English.

I would suggest that when we sing "Negro" songs that are written in "dialect," we're better off to sing them in Standard American English.

-Joe-