We could soon hear an entirely different song emitting from the classic speakers of ice cream trucks on hot summer days. Good Humor worked with Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA to create a new ice cream truck tune after the company learned the old song has racist roots dating back to the 1800s.
The familiar melody, which gets plenty of kids and adults excited every summer because it signals cool treats are around the corner, is based on "Turkey in the Straw." The song was popular at minstrel shows 200 years ago — which featured white actors in Blackface acting out racial stereotypes — but Good Humor said it only recently learned of the song's racist lyrics and offensive history.
Many people were unaware of the history of the song until 2014 when Theodore R. Johnson wrote a viral NPR piece about it, explaining the minstrel shows of the 1800s had added racist lyrics to the tune, which originally came to the United States as British and Irish folk songs played on the fiddle.
"There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people," Johnson wrote in 2014.
The familiar melody, which gets plenty of kids and adults excited every summer because it signals cool treats are around the corner, is based on "Turkey in the Straw." The song was popular at minstrel shows 200 years ago — which featured white actors in Blackface acting out racial stereotypes — but Good Humor said it only recently learned of the song's racist lyrics and offensive history.
Many people were unaware of the history of the song until 2014 when Theodore R. Johnson wrote a viral NPR piece about it, explaining the minstrel shows of the 1800s had added racist lyrics to the tune, which originally came to the United States as British and Irish folk songs played on the fiddle.
"There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people," Johnson wrote in 2014.
