Increasingly I think it's bit of red herring to talk about what "gives offence", what's "offensive".

I'm not "offended" by racists; that's not the right word to sum up how they make me feel. I think they're stupid. They make me angry.

That notion of racism being bad because it "causes offence" seems a bit "BBC TV schedules from the 1970s" me. Racism is bad because it's prejudicial and violent. In institutional form it denies social and legal rights to people; in brute form it means GBH and murder.

Also, there's a big difference between what's written down and what's sung. Old canonical works of literature, such as novels that feature anachronistic racist caricatures/descriptions/speech differ from songs in that the text is *inherently* up for discussion.

You read it. You analyse it. It's a document. Is a song a document? Not when it's sung. A written text (or document) becomes a little bit closer to a song when it is read aloud or dramatised. As has been already pointed out several times in this thread, if someone performs a song live, it doesn't come with the explanatory notes that are in the songbook or the history book. The closest you get is a prefatory speech from the performer.

But plays are different again. It's a bad analogy to cite the Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew or Othello. As plays they can - and routinely are - performed in ways that can make a character (or even just a line of dialogue) mean the opposite of what the words superficially may seem to me. Plays are subject to interpretation in performance, not just in the readings of literary critics.

There are anti-racist readings of Merchant of Venice and Othello. There are feminist readings of Taming of the Shrew. That's the great thing about drama, two versions of the same play can have entirely different meanings.

It's very, very hard indeed to try to say the same thing of the songs we're talking about. Take these lines by Big Bill Broonzy: "Lookin' for a woman that ain't never been kissed
We can get along and I won't have to use my fist"

That is a very ugly line, its casual violence is truly breathtaking. In theory, I can just about imagine there's a way in which somebody, somewhere, might conceivably be able to find a context for singing that, in a way that made it "just a song", or a "piece of history". But in practice... not in a million years.