At Georgetown University in the early '80s, I heard the Grace Notes (female acapella singing group) sing “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy.” Begins:
Have you ever passed the corner of Forth and Grand?
Where a little ball o’ rhythm has a shoe-shine stand
People gather ‘round and they clap their hands
He’s a great big bundle o’ joy
He pops the boogie woogie rag
The Chattanoogie shoe-shine boy
The next year I heard the Grace Notes perform again and noted they had cut “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy” from their repertoire. I asked one of them why, and she said they had concerns about it being racially insensitive.
Thing is – and I guess this points up an essential difference in outlook between my generation and that from which the song most likely dates – when I had heard the song before, I had always pictured a white kid.
For that matter, my generation has to stretch to picture a “shoeshine boy” at all; in my life I have seen a very few adult men selling shines at prominent stands in airports, train stations and shopping malls.
Nope, it’s from Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day, the most upbeat of the trilogy.
The often-dropped last verse of Minnie the Moocher: “Late one night, after they’d been jaggin’ / they got a free ride in a wagon / Minnie game him money to pay her bail / but he left her flat in the county jail.”
And in Kickin’ the Gong Around, Minnie is presumably dead and a smacked-out Joe is reunited with her after expiring in an opium den: “It was down in Chinatown / All the cokies laid around / Some were high and some were mighty low / count millions on the floor / when a knock came on the door / and there stood old Smoky Joe. / He was sweatin’, cold and pale / He was lookin’ for his frail / He was broke and all his junk ran out..” He calls out for her and drops dead on the spot. “And as he departed / the curtains parted / and there was Minnie / Kickin’ the gong around!”
I’m a little surprised this hasn’t been mentioned since we discussed it at length here - there are editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that omit the word “nigger” and make other changes. I think the NewSouth edition is on the market by now, and someone else published an expurgated version a few years ago. Of course those versions haven’t exactly overtaken the original in popularity.
I don’t know if this was a creative change from any original, but in The Patriot, Benjamin Martin makes very clear to Colonel Tavington that all the black fieldhands and house servants on his South Carolina plantation are free hirelings. Certainly a creative change from historical reality.
You probably have a much older edition. And Then There Were None was actually in use as a title before Ten Little Indians. But it later ended up being the common one. No US version used “nigger” in the text (or title), though, and I think even “Indian” was changed.
“Puttin on the Ritz” was completely rewritten from the original lyrics, which made fun of folks in Harlem dressing fancy.
A couple of the verses :
Have you seen the well-to-do
Up on Lennox Avenue
On that famous thoroughfare
With their noses in the air
Spangled gowns upon the bevee of high browns
From down the levee
All misfits
Puttin’ on the Ritz
The original Mary Poppins includes one of the more cringe-inducing chapters in twentieth century children’s literature.
Mary, Jane, and Michael have a magic compass that takes them to various spots on the earth. When they tell the compass “West!” it takes them to a bunch of Native Americans with feathers who go around grunting “How!” “South” is “darkest Africa,” which turns out to be inhabited largely by stereotypical black mammies. It’s awful.
They eventually updated it so the people become animals, thus no racial overtones. I have read that Travers was dead set against any changes; it finally had to be explained to her that it was either change or take the book off the market, so she grumpily gave in.
–Back when I was teaching 2nd grade, I once decided to read Mary Poppins aloud to my class. I was only familiar with the updated version and was quite shocked to discover that the library copy I’d picked up was the original. Luckily I previewed the chapter a few hours before I was to read it–I wound up leaving it out altogether, which made things a bit complicated when the compass reappears in the final chapter (“Compass?” somebody asked. “What compass?” “Oh, it was another part of the book that we didn’t get to,” I said), but there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to read that stuff out loud.
One totally ironic change comes in SHOW BOAT, the great 1927 musical based on the Edna Ferber book. It’s ironic because the show is actually a huge indictment against racism with the Julie plot and the two main black characters are a hardworking husband and wife who have the most loving marriage in the whole play, and get some of the best songs too.
The first song in 1927, set in the postbellum South, began searingly and bitterly:
“N____s all work on the Missisippi,
N____s all work while the white folks play,
Loading up boats with the bales of cotton
Getting no rest til the Judgment Day.”
In 1987, when John McGlinn recorded the definitive restoration of the work, the black chorus came in, saw what they supposed to sing, and (mostly) marched out. By the way, this was in London and most of them were British.
Anyway, by the '50s movie “Colored Folks” worked on the Mississippi, and in the great 1936 one it was “Darkies” (and there was some minstrel humor with the lovely Irene Dunne in blackface singing a sweet but silly song). By the 1990s Broadway revival it was “all of us”.
Similar trouble with the n-word a year later with THE FRONT PAGE in 1928. Like SHOW BOAT, it’s actually sort of racially progressive, since the hapless white anarchist whose execution the cynical reporters are waiting for is on death row for accidentally killing a black policeman. But as the newsmen remark, “Poor sucker’s gonna die because he killed a n____ policeman in a town where the n_____ vote is important.” The 1931 film used “colored policeman” and I don’t think the 1940 adaptation, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, mentioned the race of the victim at all.
Depends on the place, though. When I was living in Japan (between 1995 and 1998) it was available for rental in practically any video-DVD rental store I went in. English with Japanese subtitles. Easy to find, too. I could have bought a copy for myself, but I didn’t think of doing it.
The line in the British national anthem “Frustrate their knavish tricks” used to be “Frustrate their popish tricks” until George V asked for it to be changed.
There were briefly whole verses incorporated about crushing the French and the rebellious Scots, too.
The adventures of that great European hero, Tintin, have undergone some… interesting changes over the years. When he started out in the 1920s, the author (Hergé) was working for a right-wing middle-class Catholic children’s newspaper. The first adventure has him battling those evil Bolsheviks. Then he goes off to the Belgian Congo and blows up wildlife for fun, and also teaches those stupid natives basic arithmetic, and lectures them on loving their motherland (i.e. Belgium!).
To give him his credit, Hergé did learn something of the error of his ways. For example, The Blue Lotus, written in the 1930s, is a pro-Chinese indictment of Japanese imperialism, and pokes fun at European/American ignorance of (and arrogance in) the Far East.
Unfortunately, Hergé never came up with a convincing representation of Black/African characters, even when he tried (such as his story featuring Black pilgrims to Mecca being tricked into slavery). Even the rewritten and redrawn Congo adventure is apparently still pretty dire, although I’ve also heard that it’s actually quite popular in Congo itself. I think the book is still sold with a warning wrapper in the UK, though.
Anyway, that’s all by way of background. When the stories were sold to the States after the War, the US publisher insisted on the race of minor characters being changed. Any Black character had his ethnicity altered for no discernible reason. Although a hint at the unconscious (?) bigotry involved is that one of the Black characters whose ethnicity is changed was shown thrashing one of the main (White) characters…
Hergé also had an anti-capitalist streak, and the original version of one of his stories has for a villain an American financier with a big nose and a Germanic surname… this character was later redrawn, had his nationality changed, and was given a less unsubtle name.
I believe that I heard or read that the Doctor Doolittle books by Hugh Lofting have been purged of racist depictions of people he encountered during his travels. I read these books during the 60s, so my memory of them is vague. I think that non-Europeans were portrayed as stupid or childlike. I think I’ll visit the library today and see if they have old and new editions.
I learned this as “Catch a tiger by the toe”. It wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered the other version.
Paul Robeson had a lullaby he sang called “Ma Curly-Headed Baby” which is decidedly un-PC:
In later recordings he dropped that verse altogether in favor of the second verse, changed “mammy” to “mother”, toned down the dialect and made a few other changes. I sing the revised version to my own daughter; it’s a beautiful song without the historical nastiness in it.
