A lot of "cultural products" are written by WASPs, appropriating the supposed emotions of cultures that happen to be popular at the time, and radically misinterpreting them - they're the equivalent of Dick Van Dyke's strangled faux-Cockney accent in Mary Poppins. So if you're going to collect them as cultural artefacts, do so in the knowledge that they're not native to the culture you may think they belong to!

George H Clutsam, who composed this beauty, was a white Australian of the late 19th and early 20th century. Rida Johnson Young and Chauncey Olcott composed Mother Machree - well, Olcott's mother, Margaret Doyle, was from Cork, so he gets a pass. Frederick Weatherly of Somerset wrote the lugubrious Danny Boy, putting it to an existing Irish air. And so on. Sometimes the cultural appropriation goes both ways - lots of Irish-Americans still love Danny Boy and assume it's genuinely Irish, like its tune.

It would be a very interesting study for a doctoral student to take a body of genuine work from black America of the 1800s-1900s and compare it with the cotton-pickin'-piccaninny genre beloved of the vaudeville circuit and recording industry.