[Dixielandjazz] non-PC Choo Choo

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

From: Pat Ladd <pj.ladd at btinternet.com>


came a query concerning my words "the depressing unregenerate banal cheeriness of the Miller chestnut". 

"Come now!" says he. "What do you expect a song celebrating a guy going home 
to his girl to sound like? `Gloomy Sunday` St James s Infirmary?" 


An excellent question and very precisely put. Of course I wuz consoyned, as ham actors would say in the roles of minor hoods, 

radder wid da point of view of the youth who if a platinum blond cockney on the steps of Waterloo station in London could safely be called a bootblack,  

he would no doubt observe, in accent or dialect I shall not attempt to transcribe, 

"you're making a Helluva song and dance about it, mate!" 

In which he would be at least half-right, 

just as I am being not less than fifty per cent unserious! 

Imagine a sorry fair-haired English shoe-shiner, his pallid hands mottled with the stuff of his trade, disenchanted after a personally unhappy outcome to an event which began in the same spirit as the happy homecomer's song. 
He might well lack the cultural or ethnic background to sustain his composition of, say, a Chattanooga Boo-Hoo Blues 

Cheers!
Robert