Chapter 1: Section 4: Page 33: Line 155 (527)

 Somewhere a small string orchestra was playing an arrangement of "Old Zip Coon."

* * * * * * * * * *

It might not come as a surprise to you because the name of the song is "Old Zip Coon" but it's pretty racist. Obviously the music part isn't racist so being played by a string orchestra would probably make a time traveler think, "Oh, they're playing 'Turkey in the Straw'!" And I don't think that song was racist. Although it was an old song that I haven't heard since elementary school in the 70s so that doesn't bode well for the whole "not racist" angle. And now that I've looked at the lyrics, I suspect it was written racist and then somebody thought, "You know what? This song isn't racist enough for me!" And then they wrote "Old Zip Coon." Also looking at more "Turkey in the Straw" facts, I discovered it was a popular song to play in blackface at Minstrel Shows in the time of this story. No wonder Barney and The Wiggles and every kids' entertainer who somehow couldn't give up the song had to completely change the lyrics.

"Old Zip Coon" has many stanzas and goes on for only about five minutes but it sounds like it goes on forever. The version I listened to was on YouTube and had the comments turned off explicitly because they knew exactly the kinds of comments it would have garnered on YouTube. Although it sounds like, in their reasoning for turning off the comments, they didn't have the foresight to initially turn off comments and they were surprised by the general masses. Maybe they were surprised so many people were commenting, "Ugh. This is racist garbage. Why does it exist?" And they were tired of saying, "Historical things are often racist but we have to keep hearing them over and over or else you're erasing history!" And then the commenters were probably all, "Maybe if you had an old wax tube recording but this guy re-recorded this shit for some reason. That seems odd, doesn't it?" And then the YouTube channel was probably all, "Barney the Dinosaur recorded it too!" And then everybody had to Google Barney's version of "Old Zip Coon" which was actually "Turkey in the Straw" and then they came back to say, "Okay but he really changed the lyrics and, by the way, 'Turkey in the Straw' wasn't great but somebody thought they needed to racist up that racist shit?" but by then the comments were turned off.