As outrageous as those lyrics seem now, the reality wasn't so black and white in Foster's day.
The famous African American abolitionist (and former slave), Frederick Douglass, cited songs like "Uncle Ned" and "My Old Kentucky Home" as "allies" in the fight against slavery: "They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish."
In Britain, "Uncle Ned" was a standard in school songbooks well into the 20th century.
One Padstonian told me that the Darkie Day songs were taught at the local primary school in the Seventies, and possibly even as late as the Eighties, including a tune called "Little Nigger."
Seeing that I wasn't familiar with the song, he recited the words, penned by an anonymous author:
I 'ad a little nigger
He wouldn't grow no bigger
So I put 'im in the wilebeest show.
What? Surely I'd misheard him. "Wilebeest? Like 'wild beast'?"
"Yeah," he shrugged. "Of course, there's all different verses. We don't sing the whole song. 'Cause ya know we 'ad problems. So wherever we've got the word 'nigger' we now change it to 'mummer'." He grinned. "So then we're politically correct."
"So what do you make of that?"
"Welllll… when you're drunk, who can tell what you're singing?"
The famous African American abolitionist (and former slave), Frederick Douglass, cited songs like "Uncle Ned" and "My Old Kentucky Home" as "allies" in the fight against slavery: "They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish."
In Britain, "Uncle Ned" was a standard in school songbooks well into the 20th century.
One Padstonian told me that the Darkie Day songs were taught at the local primary school in the Seventies, and possibly even as late as the Eighties, including a tune called "Little Nigger."
Seeing that I wasn't familiar with the song, he recited the words, penned by an anonymous author:
I 'ad a little nigger
He wouldn't grow no bigger
So I put 'im in the wilebeest show.
What? Surely I'd misheard him. "Wilebeest? Like 'wild beast'?"
"Yeah," he shrugged. "Of course, there's all different verses. We don't sing the whole song. 'Cause ya know we 'ad problems. So wherever we've got the word 'nigger' we now change it to 'mummer'." He grinned. "So then we're politically correct."
"So what do you make of that?"
"Welllll… when you're drunk, who can tell what you're singing?"
* * *
©J.R. Daeschner
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