Florida Rights Org., Longing For Plantation Life No Longer, Seek To Nix "Old Folks At Home"

The Los Angeles Times:

"Miami, FL -- Whenever Floridians sing their state song at sporting events, school recitals and inaugurations, voices trail off in the third line of the chorus as the politically correct skip over or mumble the most offensive of its lyrics.

"'Old Folks at Home,' the official Florida ballad that voices an illiterate slave's nostalgia for the Suwannee River, has been a source of embarrassment and discord for decades for its allusions to 'darkeys' and 'longing for de old plantation.'

"The song, written by Pennsylvanian Stephen C. Foster in 1851 and adopted by Florida 84 years later, may soon be consigned, though, to the dustbin of the outdated. Republican Gov. Charlie Crist nixed the song from his inauguration a year ago, giving critical mass to a campaign underway since the 1960s civil rights movement to replace the ode, commonly known as 'the Swanee River song,' with one more reflective of modern Florida.

"The Florida Music Educators Assn. has been conducting a contest -- 'Just Sing, Florida' -- for a new state song since April. A panel of music teachers listened to 243 entries submitted over six months, pared down the field to 20 and then to three."

The new song will be announced Friday, and two state lawmakers intend to submit a bill to make it the official replacement for Foster's.

"There just comes a point in time when you need to make a change. We're not throwing the old song away; we're just retiring it," said state Sen. Tony Hill, a Jacksonville Democrat. "It should go into an archive or a museum where people can see that was the Florida of 1935. But it's not the Florida of 2008 -- a darkey longing for his plantation."