YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are the social justice warriors coming for your album collection?
Related: For music archivists, a contemporary dilemma: Should racist songs from our past be heard today?
In mid-June, the Grammy-winning husband and wife producers Lance and April Ledbetter already had pallets stacked with finished copies of their new box set, “The Harry Smith B-Sides,” when they visited a farmers market stall near their home outside of Atlanta. They’d been in quarantine mode, but it was June in Georgia, so … peaches.
By coincidence, their farmer-friend John was playing the 1952 collection “Anthology of American Folk Music,” compiled by the late New York experimental filmmaker, artist and collector Harry Smith. The Ledbetters’ four-CD, 84-track project was a kind of follow-up to that set.
Smith’s achievement sounds basic in the playlist age, but it was unprecedented at the time. He mixed raw pre-war Delta blues by Black artists with white Appalachian fiddle tunes that sounded more alike than different. Louisiana Cajun songs butted against the Carter Family’s harmonious country. Smith didn’t identify the race of the artists he included.
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Before their visit to the market, the Ledbetters had been involved in a series of conversations during production about the importance of historical documentation and reckoning with America’s harsh past. Along with co-producer Eli Smith, they had committed to including the three songs, along with a note that acknowledged the racist language and identified the offending tracks.
“At the time, we felt that by including them we were making a statement like, ‘Here are the tracks that have racist, terrible language.’” Liner notes would fill in the rest, Lance, 44, recalls on the phone from Atlanta.
But at the market stand, when he heard farmer John broadcasting the “Anthology,” Ledbetter had a realization.
“I looked around in that tent, and it was white people, Black people, Hispanic people, young people and old people — a snapshot of people you see in Atlanta,” he says. “And my mind immediately went to that Bill and Belle Reed song.
“At that moment I realized a note wasn’t sufficient,” he said. “Those tracks have to come off.”
So after excising and replacing each of the three tracks with five seconds of silence, the producers remanufactured thousands of compact discs and repackaged the sets. It made sense from a business perspective: A single out-of-context tweet expressing outrage at the offending songs might light a fire they couldn’t control.
And something that’s a much bigger seller than The Harry Smith B-Sides was censored in 2018 by a woker and wiser Guns N Roses: Guns N Roses remove [1988 “One in a Million”] song with homophobic and racist lyrics from album.
In Soviet America, the future is certain; it’s the past which is always changing.