'For example, just because songs come out of a foxhunting culture is no reason to for people who are against fox-hunting to avoid singing them. In fact I think there is a good case for singing them all the more.'

An interesting point. There was a thread a while back - a parent of a kid at an American school objected because the school choir were planning to sing 'Pick a Bale of Cotton'.

Can we still sing songs and claim to reject the cultural values of the society that produced these songs?

As I remember the school choir were forced to drop the song.

I suppose it depends on how morally reprehensible you find the culture and how thoroughly you feel you must reject it.

The Kipling thread is related to this in a way. I think in the 1960's - when it was the fifty years since the Ist world war, and there were still a lot of veterans around telling it as it was - really it was the first time they had been encouraged to do just that - and there was that land mark TV series cataloguing the horrors of the trenches - well it changed a lot of peoples attitudes.

Suddenly I think there was a sort of revulsion at the English patriot poets of the 1890's - all that stuff that Kipling and the bloke who wrote Drakes Drum and that sort of thing stood for. I think the recent play asking for compassion for the man has made some of us catch our breath a bit. We remember the testimony of the poor sods Kipling and his ilk, had conned into taking the kings Shilling.

Also at that time, the Dubliners (the 1960's) were emerging with songs like The Kerry Recruit (about the Crimean War). Patriotism of the Kipling kind seemed disreputable and rather dishonest.

Perhpas some generations are just too close to the action to view the songs dispassionately as good songs.