Some Musical Context

A friend of mine today sent me one of the more shocking and eye-opening essays I've seen in some time. It's a blog post about a seemingly innocuous song, "Lassus Trombone." It's a tune known by virtually every trombonist. I've played it many times. I'll never play it again, and shouldn't play it again. You're welcome to read the essay on David Yeo's blog here. To summarize the point Yeo makes, "Lassus Trombone" was part of a suite of songs ("The Trombone Family") whose style and marketing were steeped in ugly racial stereotyping from the era of minstrel shows. 

This was the second time this week I bumped into an ugly legacy for music I thought was benign. Sherry was preparing to be part of a recording of American folk tunes. Just a few days before the recordings were due, her teacher told her that they would be eliminating several southern tunes in the piece. Why? The lyrics for those tunes were highly offensive. The two of us read the lyrics and realized immediately that playing those tunes simply weren't appropriate. 

Will we ever play these tunes again? I don't know. There are occasions in which historians can lend context to allow an audience to understand the circumstances surrounding a work of art's creation, and help clarify how the dated piece of work doesn't reflect values today. Sometimes the material is too offensive to be redeemed (such as the tunes redacted from Sherry's ensemble's piece). "Lassus Trombone" has no lyrics, which makes it's possible rehabilitation more questionable (though I can't play it again). Sometimes the work is so profound that, after there's been an attempt to educate, we can put it out for people to view again, as what the rights-holders to online versions of Gone with the Wind are attempting. Within the classical music world, there is acknowledgement of the antisemitism that is part of Wagner's legacy. Society would be poorer if we couldn't hear Wagner's works. But it won't be poorer if we're done with "Lassus Trombone." 

Reading this essay saddened me that I won't be teaching U.S. History in the fall, for I would have enjoyed creating a lesson around what I learned today regarding that song. Minstrelsy is a challenging topic to teach to high school students. There's no media saved of it, so it's hard to explain. But it was an important and ugly part of American popular culture and it incubated many of the most harmful memes and images that have challenged modern society. When I teach an advanced history class, we inevitably bump into the concept (after all, the term "Jim Crow" comes from the world). But I don't know if I move the students beyond a minstrel-show-equals-bad way of comprehending it. So their understanding is at best surface-level. More likely, they forget what I even taught. And I even know how I would end that lesson, with a showing of this clip from Showboat, featuring "Ol' Man River," perhaps the first attempt in a Broadway show to have a black character sing about the black experience. Something of a counter-minstrelsy piece of American culture.