I like the new jingle. Watching the video for it and seeing how the animated truck rolled (heh), I was disappointed the Kia Soul commercial’s Hip Hop Hamsters weren’t in there singing.
OK, so someone at the National Review thinks that there could be a perfectly innocent explanation, and since he considers that plausible, no evidence for his position is necessary, counter to the significant evidence for the opposite position. Got it.
they’ll have someone else remake the song again when that fact hits public consciousness.
I don’t have a strong sense of the cultural connotations of the Turkey tune to speak to that, but getting rid of it and replacing it with a composition by RZA? Really? Here’s a quick selection of Wu Tang Clan lyrics, spoilered because I’ve left the homophobic slurs in there verbatim:
You fag, you couldn’t pull one drag off my blunt
(It’s Yourz)
Wash a nigga mattress faggot, you heard about me right?
(What You In Fo’)
I think the mic is on the fritz
Faggot sandmen! They be sabotaging’ shit
(What The Blood Clot)
Faggots, homos, yo…
Faggot (bitch), you fuck around punk…
(Duck Season)
So… Turkey In the Straw is tainted by it’s racist connotations, but RZA and Wu Tang Clan are not tainted for the use of explicit homophbic slurs? And these are recent songs, written by a currently active group of which RZA is the leader. And it’s not even as though they wrote a couple of songs like this in their earlier years and have since reformed.
But no, you see, they were just being “real” while pandering to white suburban adolescents.
I’m sure you will be willing to cite the “considerable evidence” you claim. Just to remind you of the actual claim being made:
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Ice cream parlours regularly played minstrel music for their customers.
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A tune played very frequently was “Turkey in the Straw.”
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The specific version that they played was one with racially offensive lyrics.
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This led to the association of the song with Ice Cream.
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Ice cream vans use the tune because it was already connected to ice cream in the public mind.
If you have evidence for any of this, please show it. Where is the evidence that parlours played music at all? Where is the evidence that they regularly played that one specific version of that tune? Can you show that the public linked that tune to ice cream before ice cream trucks were a thing?
This is like objecting to picnic.
Neither Turkey In The Straw nor anybody wanting to cancel Turkey In The Straw raises much passion from me.
But after all, the swastika wasn’t originally a racist symbol; that doesn’t mean we should all be OK with it now.
I’m not saying Turkey rises to that level of appropriation, but it does appear to have been fairly significant.
If there’s enough of a subset of potential ice cream consumers who are disturbed by the tune, I’m perfectly fine with changing it.
That’s obviously the criterion. Although - even if the connotation was so old virtually nobody living remembered it, the fact that this researcher has unearthed the sordid history (and it has been quite widely publicized) now does mean every time we hear the tune we’ll think of this. So it’s kind of circular, but perhaps the bell cannot be unrung.
I’d like to see some real evidence as the article calls for.
Both the NPR story and the NR story agree on the following points:
1: There are many different sets of lyrics set to the “Turkey in the Straw” tune.
2: There were multiple such sets of lyrics used in minstrel shows which were very racist.
3: Minstrel shows are, themselves, inherently racist.
4: The most popular set of lyrics for that tune, at the time, was one of the racist ones.
5: Ice cream parlors of the time played something called “minstrel music”, including some to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”.
6: Because ice cream parlors played songs to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”, so did ice cream trucks, when they appeared on the scene.
From here is where they differ. From those six points, the NPR author concludes that the ice cream parlors were playing racist songs to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”, and that thus the song as originally played by ice cream trucks was almost certainly racist.
The NR author, however, from those six points concludes that the song the ice cream parlors were playing to that tune could have been something non-racist, because “minstrel show music” could have meant something other than the racist music used in minstrel shows, and that because it’s possible that the song used was something other than the most popular version, it definitely isn’t racist.
The claim fails at (3)* which happens to be the key point because it’s where the racism comes in. 19th Century ice cream parlors had music boxes, playing instrumental music only, not gramophones playing music with lyrics.
Here’s an article by the writer who popularized this controversy. And here’s the sentence from the article that addresses (3):
As Richard Parks writes in the Winter 2014 issue of Lucky Peach magazine, most ice cream parlors across the nation in the 1890s utilized the Regina Style 11 Music Box, which, among other fiddle tunes and waltzes, played songs like “Dixie.”
Admittedly, Dixie is not good company to be in. 
But I don’t think anyone clamored for a waltz due to racist lyrics.
*(3) in the list by Peter_Morris, not the list by Chronos.
Have you even read the NR story? It outright disagrees with NPR on several of these points, and doesn’t even mention several others.
NR Does not say this. But allow me to rebut it. There were indeed various versions including Turkey, Do Your Ears Hang Low, and Zip Coon. The first two are patently not racist. As for the third, I’ve read and listened to the lyrics, and it looks to me that it is about an anthropomorphic racoon. Checking the dates the song predates the first known use of coon as a racial slur by a few years. I do not believe it was written about a black man.
NR specifically disagrees with this.
"this “Watermelon” rendition was, in the grand scheme of things, one of the vast majority of pop songs that comes and goes in a flash. "
Again, NR challenges this claim.
“He notes, almost in passing, “19th century ice cream parlors played the popular minstrel songs of the day.” Is that really true? Johnson gives no evidence, and it sounds like a stretch.”
The whole point of the NR article is to disagree with this claim.
Again, directly opposed to what he said. He asks for evidence that the ice cream parlours played that song at all. Or that they played any music.
Have you heard Regina Music Boxes? That’s the proto-sound of an ice cream truck. And as the music boxes played instrumentals, there’s no way to know what mental images were conjured up in the minds of 19th century listening customers in ice cream parlors.
Minds, remember, that haven’t existed for more than a century.
So in my opinion, someone is really, REALLY looking to be offended here.
That Good Humor would collaborate with a musician known for misogynistic and homophobic lyrics for a replacement jingle is just the delicious irony icing on the snowflake cake.
I always knew this as “The Hiking Song.” We’d go on hikes and sing it, but I don’t know if anyone knew any lyrics at all, the whole point was just to make up the most ridiculous lyrics we could think of.
In the early days of my business, I was thinking of jingles, and wrote one to this tune. As I had been previously burned on my lyricsizing of O Fortuna, (apparently, it is under copyright until 2030) I looked this one up, which was hard, as I only knew the tune, not any words.
After some searching, I did manage to find it. While reading about it, I came across the fact that it had a history in minstrel shows, and chose to abandon that line of thought on the jingle.
Good on Hood Humor for recognizing that an alternative offering could be desired.
Now, if we can just get them to upgrade their sound systems so it doesn’t sound like a dying animal when it drives by.
While I trust alt-right morons are scrambling to do exactly that, if they gain any sort of platform they will collide with copyright law and DMCA takedowns. I assume Good Humor owns the copyright.
Personally, I don’t see it as a big deal if a multinational corporation refreshes its jingle once every hundred years, but to each his own. As for those who would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, I’ll note that in an age with widespread access to Wikipedia, corporate image consultants don’t like it when their brand’s main musical theme is connected with paint-peeling bigoted lyrics.
Except that we don’t need alt-right morons to do anything, when we can already reference the explicit homophobia and misogyny of Wu-Tang Clan. All these idiot corporate image consultants have done is substitute a tune tainted with racism with a tune tainted with the (well known, much more recent, and no less paint-peeling) homophobia of their chosen composer. So they didn’t gain much benefit from their access to Wikipedia, I guess.
I’m guessing that as long as the jingle itself didn’t have offensive lyrics attached to it (even better- no vocals at all), that they figured they wouldn’t be too demanding with the background checks. Not the safest choice to be sure, but I trust the issue was raised at Good Humor central.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the kids decide to hire a new musician every decade or so. Crazy, out-of-the-box thinking.
This is a bizarre double standard. Discovering the racist connotations the Turkey tune required a “background check” by a researcher going back beyond living memory. That’s tainted, but choosing a composer who is well known to have written extremely offensive homophobic lyrics in recent memory is okay? You “trust” Good Humor’s judgment on this, that makes it okay?
A “background check” that can be easily discovered by an idle search for the song on wikipedia.
It’s not an outrage, it’s just an acknowledgement that it is time to have some other options for our neighborhood ice cream trucks. I had never even really realized that the song on the ice cream truck was that old tune, as bad as the sound systems are, but after I had actually looked it up and heard a rendition not sung by a bunch of tired boyscouts, I did recognize it the next time I heard an ice cream truck, and I did think it was a bit odd that they would use it. Not really cringeworthy, but raised eyebrow worthy. My assumption was simply that whoever picked the song simply didn’t know the connections that it had.
Are you actually outraged about the composer of the new jingle, or are you just telling us that we should be?