How do you separate the music from the racism?

[Austin]

There are some really racist titles for pieces. How do you separate the racism associated with them from the actual music? Because they are incredibly fun to play.

[Byron Thomas]

There are a lot of early pieces for banjo and popular American music (1840's to at least the 1910's) that depicted horrible caricatures of various groups of people. When dealing with this music, I just understand that racist material may show up, especially in the lyrics and interpretations. That was the time in which it was written. However, there is a lot of information that can be learned from these pieces. Not only are you learning the music, but you are also getting a glimpse at the general sentiment for society of the day and what was allowed to go unchecked.

[Jody Stecher]

I think you have answered your own question.  

[Jody Stecher]

In the upper right corner of the home page (and other pages ) on this site  is a search window. Type in "racism" and then you can read past discussions on the topic.

[Russ Chandler]

My take on this is that if I'm playing the tune out to a general audience I just change the title.

There's a long tradition of this - Morleytown and so on. If I play A Darkie Chuckle at a gig or folk club I call it "Joe's Chuckle" to sit in that tradition.

If I'm in a specialist audience (like this one) or at a classic banjo concert I might use the original title but I would alway contextualise it - "here's another great tune with a dreadful old title" or so on. Even if we're just chatting at a festival or so on I think it's important to do that because you never know who might overhear and if we want our music to have some relevance we have to respect the people around us.

On the broader point I don't think we should ever hide from acknowledging the racism bound up with the history of our music, whether that be the minstrel shows, the horrible song titles or the Kipling poem "Song of the Banjo".

But racism is a political position, not a series of notes. There's no reason why we can't play these wonderful tunes we all love and understand where they were coming from even if we don't endorse some of that history.