In the early 60’s my family lived in the small town of Batesville, Mississippi for about 5 months. During that time, I was in the 5th grade. In our class we performed a short comedy play titled, “The Sons of the Old Gray Mule.” I had not thought about this in a long time, but I recently came across a mimeographed copy of the script that my mother had saved along with many other artifacts of my childhood.
The play is about a lodge meeting of all black characters. It is written entirely in what I can only describe as ‘black dialect’. For example, “Bruddah Head Kicker, befo’ we goes mo’ distance wid dis meetin’, I wants to remark a few sayin’s wid yo’ kin’ commission an’ percent.” (It’s slow reading for me now, so I can’t help but wonder how 5th graders did with it.)
While the script would be considered racist today, remember, this was at the same time that “The Amos and Andy Show” was still being re-run on local TV stations and minstrel variety shows were still being presented in high school auditoriums. I can’t say with certainty, but I suspect that the Batesville, Miss. elementary school I attended at the time was all-white.
While the representation of the play’s characters can be said to be ignorant, the writing, punctuation and comedy are, if not sophisticated, not the product of a stupid person(s). But there are no credits of any kind on the thing.
And that is the sum of my knowledge of it. Google turns up nothing. My expectation is that this thread will yield nothing. This may have been something written by a teacher in that small town school and only a few dozen mimeographed copies were made. But my curiosity is peaked enough to ask if anyone has ever heard of this play or has any other information about such things.