I Scream

In the latest edition of the Catholic Herald, Cathy Majtenyi informs us that “Today’s racism is built on a bedrock of history.” The example she cites is “Turkey in the Straw,” recently withdrawn by Good Humor as the jingle played by their ice cream trucks, because it enshrines and celebrates a “racial injustice created more than 100 years ago.”

This troubles me. The distinctive sound of the ice cream truck, and the tune “Turkey in the Straw,” are a part of our shared heritage. We have too few such little grace notes in our lives, too few things we share as a community and a society, too few things that bring us together. We hear that jingle, and for a moment each one of us is a child again. It is reassuring that some things never change.

Who would want to take one away? It is like robbing from eternity. It is, almost literally, like taking candy from a baby.

And how can “Turkey in the Straw” be racist? How can a tune be racist? Music is non-representational.

How many children, hearing that tune, or even adults hearing it, are thinking racist thoughts as a result? Is this plausible? Is this even sane?

“Turkey in the Straw” is a folk tune. Being a folk tune, it is not associated with any particular lyric; many lyrics have been set to the tune, and new ones are probably added every day. That is the way with folk tunes. Were you to hold every folk tune somehow responsible for every lyric ever sung to it, all folk tunes would be offensive to someone.

Including, almost instantly, whatever new jingle Good Humour can concoct.

The oldest published lyrics to the tune we commonly refer to as “Turkey in the Straw” are an Irish song, “The Rose Tree”:

A rose tree in full bearing,
Had flowers very fair to see,
One rose beyond comparing,
Whose beauty attracted me;
But eager for to win it,
Lovely, blooming, fresh, and gay,
I found a canker in it,
And threw it very far away.

Ireland is the land of happy war songs and sad love songs. Possibly insulting to roses, but nothing racist here.

“Turkey in the Straw,” however, if we are going to use that title, refers to another set of lyrics, which emerged in the 19th century.

Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay
Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay
Roll 'em up an' twist 'em up a high tuc-ka-haw
An' twist 'em up a tune called Turkey in the Straw.

Obviously, the tune predates the lyrics. Yet, again, nothing racist.

Went out to milk, and I didn't know how,
I milked the goat instead of the cow.
A monkey sittin' on a pile of straw,
A-winkin' at his mother-in-law.

These lines are just nonsense. A comic folk song with a rural setting. At least since ancient Greece, the rural or rustic has been understood as comic. This one perhaps with a bit of a twist: it sounds as though an urbanite is being laughed at for not knowing how to fare on a farm.

Growing up, I only knew of a different lyric, a common campfire song:

Oh, the cow kicked Nellie in the belly in the barn
And the old farmer said that it would do her no harm

Repeated endlessly. Something that endlessly amused a small child. Like the ice cream truck.

Again, just a comic verse with a rural setting. Nothing racist about it. You might construe it as sexist, if you did not know cows were female.

Majtenyi explains: “in the 1800s, minstrel performers in the U.S. attached racist lyrics to the melody.”

So what? Racist lyrics can be sung to any tune, and probably have. This is surely an unjust appropriation on their part and denigration on her part of a piece of my Irish heritage. And if they ever did, surely no one remembers those lyrics.

Given the date she cites, Majtenyi and Good Humor are apparently thinking of a song called “Zip Coon” that used the melody and appeared in the 1830s. Its lyrics were variable, but apparently the chorus is constant:

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.
Posum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip Coon will jump. 

Again, really just nonsense—a comic rural verse. It only happens that now the comic rustic character singing the song is black.

Zip Coon is not clearly being insulted; there is not a tone of hostility. It is a real accomplishment, and a legitimate kind of scholarship, to be able to sing well. The verse is humourous, but not cutting. It is not satire. It merely contrasts, like the “Turkey in the Straw” lyric, the difference between the skills that matter in country life, and in the city.

Were the rustic, like Nellie or the old farmer, or the narrator of “Turkey in the Straw,” understood to be white, there is nothing offensive here. We laugh readily enough at whiteface clowns, and they are usually understood to be rustics. That is what the word “clown” means.

How then can it be offensive simply because the comic rural character is, in this one version of the lyrics, in a Southern US setting, portrayed as black?

This indicates not discrimination against blacks, or African-Americans, but discrimination in their favour. It is commonplace to laugh at “hillbillies” or “rednecks” or “bubbas,” and we all do. But the instant it is suggested that the skin of the clown is black, laughter is not permitted.

That is, in a word, racism. Skin colour ought not to matter. We are all the same under it.

And indeed, we all, under those skins, have delighted in the sound of the ice cream truck. We all lose something when we no longer can: simply because of the colour of our skin.