The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #15687   Message #2625806
Posted By: Jack Campin
06-May-09 - 05:59 PM
Thread Name: Racist songs .... arghhhh!
Subject: RE: Racist songs .... arghhhh!
There are some songs that haven't been buried anywhere near as deep with a stake through their chests as the ones mentioned so far. I have here a copy of The Hootenanny Sing Book (reprints from Sing Out, ed. Irwin Silber, 1963) which includes The Road to Eilat, a Zionist militarist number about expropriating Arab land by armed force and which includes an extra verse saying what a good and progressive idea that was by none other than Pete Seeger.

Then we have Dublin in the Rare Ould Times, in which the narrator attacks one character for being both Black and English and hence not the sort of person who had any business being in Dublin. I'd hate to think how Gypsies might feature in Pete St John's songs.

I've never heard anyone sing the Eilat thing and don't expect to (quite likely both Silber and Seeger would now disown it), but Dublin in the Rare Ould Times is a permanent fixture in the plastic-Paddy repertoire.

Anti-English racism is a recurrent theme in some Scottish music genres. Usually takes the form of how the song (or tune, sometimes) is framed and introduced, rather than with the content itself.