Jeri and I agreed that it was getting confusing to have two threads open on basically the same subject, so I moved all the posts from the last couple days over to here.

Jim Carroll brings up the verse from "Johnny Come Down to Hilo":

"I've never seen the like since I was born
As a big buck n..... with his sea-boots on"

I came across that conundrum when we were doing the Rise Again Songbook in 2014-15. I didn't work on the first volume, Rise Up Singing (RUS), but I sure heard the complaints about how our editors bowdlerized so many songs. RUS was updated by the publisher, Sing Out! Magazine, and most of the worst bowdlerizations were removed. We really wanted to use this song, because it's so much fun to sing and has such a great chorus - but we had to figure out how to deal with the Sea Boots Problem. One suggestion was to change the line to "a big buck farmer with his sea boots on." I think I had to have a minor tantrum to get that one thrown out. I think what I suggested was "a Barbadian sailor with his sea-boots on," but we ended up with "An American sailor with his sea-boots on." I'm not totally happy with any solution, but we had to do something. There was no way we could publish a community songbook with the original lyrics, even though we tried hard to be historically accurate.

One battle I lost big-time was on "Sweet Betsy from Pike." I wanted to include all 11 original verses, but the editor insisted that we had to cut. We ended up with 8, not all original - and he cut out the "Hangtown" verse because he thought people might be offended by the glorification of hanging. This is the most famous song about the area where I lived and I've spent a lot of time researching it, so it was important to me to have all the verses. But I lost that fight. We also cut out most of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" for reasons of space, but that really bothered me. Otherwise, I think we did pretty well.

-Joe-