After about 1928-29, what happened to 'Cotton-eyed Joe' will have to be found elsewhere than in the recorded music industry. The Great Depression and the increasing importance of radio as a source of entertainment changed everything for what had been essentially an amateur, down-home music from people like Carson who was born in 1868 and learned tunes like 'Cotton-eyed Joe' direct from family and friends. Only the tried and tested or the desperately novel could survive in the Depression years and what emerged in the second half of the 30s was a bird of very different wing that, after the second social cataclysm of World War II, sloughed off its rural amateurism entirely to become a vernacular popular music that gave Tin Pan Alley a run for its money (and ultimately gave rise to young Garth and the other hats). The tension was there already by the late 20s - you can see it reflected in the Skillet Lickers with Gid Tanner reaching back to the past and Clayton McMichen and Lowe Stokes straining forward to the future. As Bob Coltman so aptly put it 'Uncle Dave Macon, the Skillet Lickers (minus McMichen and Stokes), Fiddlin' John Carson and Moonshine Kate ... sounded archaic. No longer did the old rousers satisfy; the melody did not linger on'.

As Frank has pointed out above, minstrel show origins almost by definition imply racist sentiments. In addition to the Karen Linn reference that he gave, chapter two of Bill Malone's 'Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers', headed 'Popular Culture and the Music of the South', provides a brief but stimulating discussion of minstrelsy, medicine shows etc.

Are there any surviving minstrel texts to tell us what Carson and his contemporaries inherited? It is a long journey from the minstrel stage to Lomax's lullaby, the Red Clay Ramblers, Michelle Shocked and Garth Brooks. It would be fascinating to know some of the steps between.