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Ragnar's Tom Lehrer Song Book |
| I Wanna Go Back To Dixie | |
| from: Tom Lehrer Revisited - 1959 |
Well, what I like to do on formal occasions like this is to take some of
the various types of songs that we all know and presumably love, and, as
it were, to kick them when they're down. I find that if you take the various
popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything
from the ridiculous to the obscene, or - as they say in New York - sophisticated.
I'd like to illustrate with several hundred examples for you this evening,
first of all, the southern type song about the wonders of the American south.
But it's always seemed to me that most of these songs really don't go far
enough. The following song, on the other hand, goes too far. It's called
I Wanna Go Back To Dixie.
I wanna go back to Dixie, Take me back to dear ol' Dixie, That's the only li'l ol' place for li'l ol' me. Old times there are not forgotten, Whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton, And waitin' for the Robert E. Lee. (It was never there on time.) I'll go back to the Swanee, Where pellagra makes you scrawny, And the honeysuckle clutters up the vine. I really am a-fixin' To go home and start a-mixin' Down below that Mason-Dixon line. Oh, poll tax, How I love ya, how I love ya, My dear ol' poll tax. Won'tcha come with me to Alabammy, Back to the arms of my dear ol' Mammy, Her cookin's lousy and her hands are clammy, But what the hell, it's home. Yes, for paradise the Southland is my nominee. Jes' give me a ham hock and a grit of hominy. I wanna go back to Dixie, I wanna be a Dixie pixie And eat corn pone till it's comin' outta my ears. I wanna talk with Southern gentlemen And put that white sheet on again,* I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years. The land of the boll weevil, Where the laws are medieval, Is callin' me to come and nevermore roam. I wanna go back to the Southland, That "y'all" and "shet-ma-mouth" land, Be it ever so decadent, There's no place like home. |
*In the studio version of this song, the line is "And put my white sheet on again."
Lehrer: "I Wanna Go Back to Dixie was a crowd pleaser in the 1950s because one associated that kind of bigotry with the South. Now the North is just as bad, so it doesn't really make much sense any more." --1996 Interview