I remember in the 1940s, my school choir (Hendon County School) singing some songs on the old BBC Radio Home Service schools programme. The "Big Buck Nigger" version was one of them, and nobody then thought anything of it. I recall too an argument with Sandy Paton when he was here in 1958: he asserted that the word "nigger" could not occur in any true folksong; so I sang him that stanza, and Redd Sullivan who was with us, himself an experienced professional Merchant Seaman, assured Sandy that that was indeed what seamen sang.

PC rewriting of history seems to me to have its dangers -- for scholarship as well as for morality.

≈M≈