I'm with those who say preserving folk history is more important than P.C. And I can't imagine an English folksong collection without the "Lincolnshire Poacher". Etiquette towards those you are singing with is always appropriate, of course: there are some songs in our family book I wouldn't sing if some of our stricter Christian friends were there, for example.

Getting slightly off topic, one branch of P.C that irritates me is the idea that only African-American people can be allowed to sing in old southern dialect. People who've never been within a thousand miles of Nashville sing C&W with a twang and nobody thinks anything of it -- in fact it would sound pretty funny sung any other way.

I recently sent a blues I wrote a zillion years ago to a friend, who commented "...I'm surprised you decided to write the lyric in "Plantation Negro" dialect. Yowsa, yowsa, yowsa." In actual fact the lyrics were written by a black American poet, Langston Hughes (often quoted by King, e.g the "Crystal Stair" speech), and written in dialect. It would have been artistically wrong of me (I think) to "clean up" his 'de's and 'ma's. Old Man River, although not technically a folk song, is so well known it might as well be one (probably will be in another 50 years), but how many people know that the orginal first line is "Niggers all work on de Mississippi", or would dare to sing it in public that way? Yet without the angry bite of that word the song loses much of its poignancy, and (as I understand it) it is authentic speech of the period represented in "Showboat".

Tony