The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168095 Message #4060304
Posted By: GUEST,Howard Jones
20-Jun-20 - 08:30 AM
Thread Name: Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Subject: RE: Swing Low Sweet Chariot
The newspaper report I read attributed it to a complaint by an African-American academic, on the grounds of 'cultural appropriation'.
I have some difficulty with the concept of cultural appropriation - on the one hand I can see where it comes from, on the other hand the sharing of ideas between cultures is how humanity has advanced. The idea that music, food, costume or anything else is the sole property of any one race or culture makes me uncomfortable. However it is a difficult area.
This is particularly true of music, which has no physical form and exists mainly as an idea, occasionally rendered as sound. Once a song is released into the wild, the original composer has very little control over it, even where copyright exists, and none at all once it is in the public domain.
The past is a murky place, and no doubt the roots of a lot of what we take for granted today could be criticised on one ground or another. I have recently received a copy of a paper which shows that "Jingle Bells" was part of the minstrelsy repertoire. Should we now drop that?
"Sweet chariot" is in no way racist. It happens to have been written by a black man who was a slave, but I suspect very few people who hear or sing it are aware of that. The very term "negro spiritual" seems to have vanished. There are more important issues, examples of real racism, which this serves only to distract from and even to undermine.