Long Live Thread Creep! I had ignored this thread as way too general to be interesting, and you guys thread creep it into a great discussion! As Kat said, a lot of this ground has already been covered in another thread, but it is very thought provoking.

I recall listening to Randy Newman's great Album Rednecks , which was a tableau of characters and attitudes of people in the south, and was meant as a humorous but rather biting satire. The first line of the first song was "Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a tv show- with some smart-ass New York Jew". Now the song was a very clever criticism of Southern public discrimination against blacks, as opposed to Northern unspoken and smug discrimination. I played this for a Jewish friend of mine, thinking that due to the fact that Newman is Jewish and the song is satiric, that he would see the humour in it. His mouth gaped at the first line, and he never heard the rest of it.

Was this a justifiable use of a racial epithet? Does Randy Newman have a special dispensation to use a phrase like that, when Merle Haggard would be brought up on charges for it? I think that, indeed, CONTEXT is the key. As I explained in the other thread Kat mentioned, My Old Kentucky Home contains (in the Foster original) the line "in summer the darkies are gay." I love the song, but find the line offensive and unnecessary to the impact of the song- I have no problem with changing it.

I think Banjer, as a Civil War re-enactor, is concerned with historic accuracy. He wants these songs presented in the context of the time, so that the audience can empathize and understand what those times were like. If My Old Kentucky Home were sung as part of a re-creation of an authentic minstrel show, I would probably agree with Banjer. However, if we hope that the song will endure as a living tradition, we need to take pains to make sure that the song, while preserving the beauty and value of the past, does not diminish the present.

LEJ