What does he care if the world's got troubles? What does he care if the land ain't free?

The intersection of music and localism is a horse I ride pretty frequently, so it's nice to see someone else do it from time to time. In this case, it's the boys from M for Musicology:

The most surprising of the lot for me is by David Z. Kushner, about debates and policies in the state of Florida during nearly a hundred years concerning what the official state song should be. (I figure that "Floridaness" is a kind of nationalism. Certainly Texanness is!) A song about this "bright sunkissed land"--so that's where the citrus-fruit brand name Sunkist comes from!--was knocked off its pedestal by the state legislators in 1913 in favor of Stephen Foster's song "Way Down upon the Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)," whose standard words declare that the protagonist is "still longing for the old plantation."

I'll let you read all the details, but, by the year 2007, plantation longings were coming to seem distasteful to many. The Florida state legislature ran a contest for a song to replace Foster's well-known song. A new song (which focuses on the beauty of the sawgrass and the sky) got voted in as state . . . anthem. Foster's "Swanee River" ended up keeping its some-pigs-are-more-equal-than-others status as official state song, and will continue to be sung at official state functions. Its words, though, have been revised to "still longing for my childhood's station." The latter phrase is apparently drawn from some version published long ago. I fear it may today suggest nostalgia for choo-choo trains.

The Florida debate is mostly about words, of course, though words fraught with major tensions deriving from America's history as a slave-holding nation.

Virginia had a similar problem in the nineties with "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," so Florida's attempts to whitewash its slaveholding past are nothing groundbreaking. I do think, though, that one of the best things about tying music to place is that it's a neutral way of admitting the past without endorsing it. If the two extremes--eliminating any mention of slavery on the one hand and flying the Confederate flag above courthouses on the other--seem like bad options, then we're left to stake out the middle ground of finding ways to cop to our inherited sins without celebrating them, which is to say making them inescapable. Hence "still longing for the old plantation"; state song or not, it's there. (This is where I would talk about the influence of spirituals on the blues if I knew anything about it.)