I don't sing old songs because I'm trying show people what life was like 100 years ago, or whatever. I'd probably fail at that anyway. I sing old songs because they're good songs, fun to sing and fun to hear. They just happen to be old. If people happen to learn something in the process of having fun, that's fine, but I try not to lecture the audience. I figure I'd just bore them and drive them away.

(That's probably why classical music bores me today. As a child, I heard it only when it came along with a lecture. Except when Bugs Bunny played it. That's the exception that proves the rule.)

Now, a song may be good in some ways and not good in others, and when that happens, I don't see anything wrong in changing it to make it better. It's not rewriting history; it's just rewriting a song, for Pete's sake. I have just as much right to rewrite it as the original writer had to write it in the first place! In fact, I think I have an obligation to change whatever offends my own sense of values. If a song has a "message" that you don't personally subscribe to, you have no business singing it.

Music is different from literature. If I were a publisher who wanted to bring out a new edition of "Huckleberry Finn," for instance, I might add some footnotes, but I would leave Mark Twain's text alone. On the other hand, if I were a screenwriter making a film adaptation, I would find it necessary to make a few carefully considered changes. It's OK to have different rules for different media.

I figure that's legitimate because actors, directors, screenwriters, and musicians -- unlike publishers, researchers, and librarians, for instance -- are artists in their own right, and collaborators, so to speak, with the original author. As an artist-collaborator, you have some rights and some responsibilities. Your responsibility is to produce a performance with some integrity, meaning it doesn't violate your own sense of decency or truth. I don't buy the excuse, "I can't help it; I don't approve of it; but that's the way the author wrote it." Yes, you can help it. The fact that you sing a certain song implies that you approve of it. If you don't approve of it, either change it into something you can approve of, or stop singing it.