If any of us are lucky enough to have someone sing one of our songs in 100 years would you be happy that they changed your lyrics - not in order to make better linguistic sense with the change of time, but because they had decided that your morals were somehow deficient?

The songs mentioned above are not racist songs. They have words and language that some people consider today to BE racist, and they cannot hear the song as a whole because of their unease with certain words.

If a song can be shown to be written purely as a taunt against certain people, then that would be a different matter. Think of all the Irish Orange and Fenian songs around....irrelevant today unless you want to continue the bigotry. You also get Irish songs written about events from the point of view of each side of the fence...they aren't written to generate hostility, just songs.

I just think most people can see the difference between a song that has language that is (temporarily and subjectively) out of kilter with the current time, and songs that are really written to target certain groups.

Part of the trouble of course is that as soon as one person objects to something, English culture in particular seems to bend over backwards to accommodate that one view, and before you know it, what was one individual view has somehow transformed into accepted wisdom.