Oh Jerry, you bring back a painful moment for me. Years ago I was teaching guitar to a woman, and we spent quite a bit of time on the song "Summertime". Got her to use some lovely chords and was right proud of myself at the results. (pride goeth before the fall!)

She scored a very nice concert gig opening for an important Irish Quartet who were on tour. I was in the audience and was very pleased that she mentioned my input before singing the song. Then the shock....She sang it exactly as the period sheet music indictated, complete with "and de libben is easy", and "yo mammy's...". Stuff like that. This was in the 1980s and not the 30s, and you could just feel that collective "intake of breath" from the audience, at the "dialect approach". Scary.

Funny thing. I found one of the old songbooks that my mother (a professional pianist) had used in the thirties, called "Songs of the Sweet Sunny South". It was just riddled with "Coon" songs, and "Southern" dialect. She was well-read and quite liberal, yet probably wasn't horrified at the contents of the song book when she acquired it. Different times, I guess.

Rick