Interesting mention in Sunday’s NYT of Virginia’s own John Powell

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/arts/music/dvorak-new-world-symphony.html?searchResultPosition=2

but rather anodyne given his White Supremacist involvement with the 1924 Racial Purity laws and the development of Anglo-Saxon Clubs.
At William and Mary, where he came to encourage a local Anglo-Saxon club, two racially charged pieces, “Turkey in the Straw” and his own “Banjo Picker, according to the student newspaper, ”were particularly well-received: both were “ardently applauded” and repeated “in response to the demands of the audience.”
In a piece at the Lemon Project site, I note that “Turkey in the Straw” was popularized in blackface minstrel shows from the 1820s and 1830s.
YouTube has a recording of “The Banjo Picker” made by Powell on a paper roll in 1917. The video shows several paragraphs about Powell and the piece; one of them notes that “The Banjo Picker” evokes “Dixie” in its opening measures and then ends “with the strains of ‘Dixie.’” Powell is quoted as saying that the “principal theme” is “a verbatim reproduction of a darky banjo-player’s version of the ‘Mississippi Sawyer’”; a “contrasting theme follows, based on the negro folk-song “Old John Hardy.’”
For more, see
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Powell_(musician)

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Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg  23187
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 Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.                 --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."






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