Ice cream trucks are still a thing? I figured they’d gone out of style with milkmen and telegrams.
Judge Doom would disagree.
This. You said it
Thank you. You made a better point than I did.
Back in the olden days when I was a kid, the Good Humor truck just rang a bell to summon the kids. Mr. Softee, on the other hand, had an endless look jingle that must have driven the drivers crazy!!!
I did not realize that tune is Turkey in the Straw 
In my mind’s ear I hear some other melody that was often played in Loony Tunes cartoons.
When I hear that tune, I want to sing:
“Do your ears hang low
Do they wobble to and fro”
or
“Well I walked around the corner and I walked around the block
And I walked right in to the doughnut shop”
The whole think seems like a non-issue but I’m not mad about it.
Yes, that is exactly the same thing as a song having a long history of being used in minstrel shows to insult an entire race. 
I’ve never heard of Turkey in the straw. Not by name or tune. Looking it up it sounds just like “ do your ears hang low” lol.
The ice cream truck tune around here is Popeye the sailor man.
I’ll bet you’re thinking of “Arkansas Traveler” (warning: YouTube link). I often get it mixed up with “Turkey in the Straw,” and it was used in cartoons with the lyrics “I’m bringing home a baby bumble bee.”
I haven’t seen an ice cream truck in years, and don’t particularly care what song they play.
Well, and a whole bunch of other racist idiots singing the racist version, at least.
An idiot just writing it would not be nearly enough to be harmful. It is when racists decide to adopt it as part of their racism that it does.
If you are that offended by the idea of losing your beloved songs due to racist idiots, then those are the ones that you should address, not those the racists are directing their ire at.
The first thing that comes into my mind when I hear Turkey in the Straw is the scene in Phony Express where Larry dances cheek to cheek with Moe and Moe pushes him angrily away. So I guess we can add homophobia to that unfortunate song.
Our ice cream trucks play some weird distorted music like a dying cassette player punctuated by a female “Hello!” every now and then. Any chance we could get that labeled as racist?
I do find it amusing, in a sad way, how every time some company decides “Hey, we’re going to try to be better people and change this thing with racist undertones” you suddenly get a pile of people who are totally invested in their syrup bottles or ice cream truck jingles or other product packaging. If you’re going to invest yourself in something for the sake of American culture, maybe pick something besides some other company’s advertising methods.
Yeah, if they had said nothing and just quietly changed the song, no one would’ve noticed. Maybe in 10 years we’ll have a thread named “Whatever happened to ice cream trucks playing ‘Turkey in the Straw’?”
Well, that’s the thing. In this modern era, you can’t just do good, you have to be SEEN doing good.
While there’s something to be said for private acts of goodness, at least you’re doing good. I’d still rather see companies make public acts of change than listen to the people who suddenly care super-duper-special deeply about the legacy of Nancy Green pitch a fit and shed crocodile tears.
Call one of them.[quote=“Jophiel, post:31, topic:918036”]
Our ice cream trucks play some weird distorted music like a dying cassette player punctuated by a female “Hello!” every now and then. Any chance we could get that labeled as racist?
[/quote]
Yeah what is up with that?
First time I heard it, I thought it was a bad recording or a busted sound system. But I’ve heard it far more often than that should indicate.
most of them use re-entrant horn loudspeakers meant for public address use. they’re made to be loud in the frequency range of voice, but are not terribly high fidelity. playing music through them usually sounds horrible.
It is, perhaps, relevant that, while not all of the song’s history is racist, the portion of the song’s history that’s responsible for it being associated with ice cream trucks is racist. When ice cream trucks started, they used instrumental versions of the same songs that were played at ice cream parlors, but the versions played at parlors were not instrumental, and had lyrics. One would imagine that a child alive at that time of transition would sing along with the lyrics from the ice cream parlors. And those lyrics they would be singing, what they would say were “the words to the ice cream truck song”, would be the racist ones.
That said, the ice cream trucks of my childhood usually played “The Entertainer”. Which is a song not only written by a black man, and an educated black man at that, but written in a style that its creator considered symbolic of literal harmony between the races.
As a cultural side note, this tune was widely used when I was kid in the U.K. The only place I’ve ever heard it is as a familiar ice cream van tune.
It’s at 48 seconds in this British selection.
