This is an interesting problem--one that I have wrestled with for years--Much of the great popular music before the twenties came from the context of minstrel shows--which were the source of not only a lot of ragtime music, but much of the humor(jokes and routines that you still see worked into TV sitcoms and cartoons today) --everytime I sing a song with Mandy or Alexander, I flinch a little--

If you want to get the creeps big time, watch the scenes from the minstrel show in "The Al Jolson Story"--you'd like to ignore it, or forget it, but there it is, and too big a part of our musical and entertainment tradition to shove it all into the back of the drawer--

In the forties and fifties movie musicals, they had a big problem, in that people were nostalgic for the music and dance routines of the old days, but it had all been done in blackface--one solution I remember (I think from the film, "Summer Stock") was that the performers in a minstrel number had their normal skin colors, but wore a single red glove--sort of a censors block, letting you you know that something objectionable had been deleted--

Back in the 60's and early 70's, I remember that my black activist friends were fond of pointing out Mickey Mouse, (who really was, like Oswald the Rabbit, and Bosco, one of those horrible little blackface pickanniny characters (can I even use that word?) as an example of how the racist stereotypes were so deeply infused into our culture--

It's really still there, too--even in the most seemingly politically correct places--for example, I was idly plucking my way through Al Jolson's masterpiece of maudlin racist sentimentality, "My Mammy" when I realized, to my horror, that it was no other song than "Puff, the Magic Dragon"--