Re: A statue- complete with banjo-pickin slave, honoring a racist songwriter was taken down and white people are calling it reverse racism
I've never heard of the song 'Old Uncle Ned', and I had to Google it, but I could Google it only because you told me the name, and I had no idea that Ned was the inspiration for that statue. My suggestion was about 'O Susanna'. Uncle Ned may have been a slave, but the banjo player in 'O Susanna' wasn't.
Goggle would not and could not have cleared that up for me, so please pardon my ignorance. There are one or two things I don't know, and Uncle Ned was one of them.
Sorry about that, I tend to forget I'm used to active research - it's probably easier for me to know how to research than it is for someone giving their best effort who, I often forget, may be unused to it. I only know a little of Foster. Most of it, including the finding of Uncle Ned, was done during perhaps a half hour, maybe forty minutes on-again/off-again last night on Google. I was listening to a movie and playing a game as well, or it wouldn't have taken me quite so long.
Technically speaking, the statue could point to a few of his popular songs (or to all of them, but I don't believe the latter is likely. The reasoning there, however, has not much to do with Ned-the-song, it's that he wrote close to three hundred works and only 20 or so mentioned black people. Since nobody describes a writer by what their music doesn't mention and The White Man was
the default ...you get the idea.
But to narrow the probability down, consider the time period, the lyrics, the statue's physicality and that in 1900 white people were actively pushing some very specific concepts about the recent past that were, uh, let's call them unashamedly vicious lies involving motive, intent and personal liability.
It didn't occur to me Old Susanna would honestly be people's first guess. Sure, it was popular and still well known today, plus there's a banjo mention - but the railroad car crash is left out of the verse collection so when people imagine singing it, they often imagine
Foster singing it, since the music usually comes on the heels of a brief Americana history lesson.
What people don't tend to imagine, I think, is an old, toothless, wrinkled bald black man singing about true love and travel as if he were twenty and train hopping. In 1900 the theme goin' in statuary seemed to be 'beneficent slavery'. That banjo player ain't wearin' travelling clothes - that it's likely to reference Old Susanna instead of the Happy Slave Social Meme of the time is, I'm saying .....slim. I try not to take the mention of a single item depicted (banjo in this case) as indicative of intent, particularly for older works; so much of the context is either never taught or forgotten.
