For years, the Potomac, Md., resident had been griping about WETA’s annual DC Fireworks Extravaganza show. Every July 4, the public television station follows its broadcast of the “Capitol Fourth” concert on the National Mall with a half-hour fireworks program using stock footage. That footage’s musical program includes Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Dixie,” the 1850s minstrel song that’s now considered an American standard.

In 2002, Graham wrote to WETA: “‘Dixie’ is totally inappropriate for an Independence Day celebration...The first time I was exposed to Elvis and Dixie, I thought it was an aberration. But each year it is there.”

The Fireworks Extravaganza didn’t include “Dixie” in 2003, Graham says, but the song was back in 2004, along with another minstrel-show song that her husband recognized: “Old Black Joe.” She wrote again. This time she heard from a representative of the station, who told her, she says, that the half-hour block “is not WETA’s program and there is nothing they can do about it.”

The footage was shot on the National Mall in 1992, according to Kevin Harris, a vice president and general manager of WETA. For years, the station showed the “Capitol Fourth” concert and the subsequent fireworks live, but as the concert increasingly stuck to a 90-minute schedule beginning at 8 p.m., the station began showing live fireworks during the credits and then running 30 minutes of the stock footage starting at around 9:30.

The audio and video was captured by a WETA production truck; that night, Harris says, radio station WMAL was hosting the festivities and broadcasting its own program of music. (After watching the footage, WETA Vice President for External Affairs Mary Stewart recognized “Dixie” as part of a Presley medley, “An American Trilogy.” She didn’t recognize “Old Black Joe.”)

Some scholars say the songs still have a place in American culture, as long as they’re presented with context. Music historian Elijah Wald says, “[The genre] is not simply racist, but it is certainly among other things racist.”

Ken Emerson, a biographer of Stephen Foster, the man who composed “Old Black Joe” in 1860, says that although many minstrel songs are racially offensive, “Old Black Joe” isn’t necessarily one of them. Looking at the lyrics, “it’s a very sympathetic song,” says Emerson, also a communications consultant whose clients have included WETA. “We might not like today to use the word ‘black,’ but it’s not derogatory.” He points out that Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois praised Foster, even as they deplored blackface.

“Of course there’s racism in this music—there’s racism in all the history of the 19th century. You can’t expunge it,” Emerson says. “I think you can play anything as long as you explain [to listeners] what they’re about to hear and why they’re about to hear it and what they’re about to learn from it.”

Harris, who’s African-American, says he doesn’t find the songs offensive. WETA, he notes, gets one, sometimes two, calls every year about “Dixie”: “The phones don’t ring off the line, even though it’s our most watched program of the year.”

Photo courtesy borman818, Creative Commons License

Morning, readers.

*John Prine gets a lot of love on a new star-packed tribute record called Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine. Conor Oberst, Deer Tick, My Morning Jacket, and the DBT are all, apparently, implicated. Sounds like a recipe for awesome. (Via Pitchfork, which also has the track listing.)

*The Independent zings the Tories ("will there be a new era of protest music?") and also zings Brian May, who, after a dispute between nine-month-old twins and a malevolent fox, sided with the fox.

*THE DEPARTMENT OF THE ONLY TWITTERER THAT MATTERERS: Dude's been on a tear recently. Like, mocking people who use lame genre signifiers, or noting certain ironies embedded in Pride Weekend, or maybe even using the unlikely contraction, "I'ma." Sure, maybe he doesn't write in our Curtain Calls section any more, but who said prolificacy had to come with semicolons? Resistance is futile. FOLLOW THIS MAN.

*...aaand if you don't have a Google alert set up for the words "modest," "mouse," or "Mayor of Portland," you probably missed the Mercury's item on Alexander Rokoff, an artist who painted a portrait of Isaac Brock and then submitted it to Sam Adams (really his name!), the august Mayor of Portland. Whether Mr. Adams is a fan of Modest Mouse, it is not for us to speculate. But in the unlikely event that the portrait grows ever more sallow & depraved-looking with each passing year...well, we'd have an explanation for Brock's perma-semi-youthfulness. Non?

*Tonight in City Lights: "One Life: Echoes of Elvis" at the National Portrait Gallery. I wrote a brief preview of the exhibit and should apologize to any readers confused as to why my blurb concerns John Lennon as much as it does Elvis Presley.

Sorry.

Photograph of fox by Darrow Montgomery

1. Elvis: My Best Man: Radio Days, Rock 'n' Roll Nights, and My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley, by George Klein and Chuck Crisafulli.
Woe to those overachievers who went to school with Elvis Presley. Even with the help of a co-author, it's unlikely that any of these also-rans will ever get voted Cutest, or Most Popular, or Most Musical, or Class Clown, or Most Likely to Marry Priscilla Ann Wagner, or even Most Vain. Just like Mel Brooks said: "It's good to be the King."

2. Right Now: A 12-Step Program For Defeating The Obama Agenda, by Michael Steele.
Right now, one of my conservative relatives is rushing to Barnes & Noble to buy Michael Steele's Right Now so that they can study it over the next eleven months and, around Thanksgiving or Christmas 2010, spring some of Steele's anti-Obama arguments on me as I unsuspectingly reach for cranberry sauce or stuffing. But these right-of-center relations labor—nay, not just labor, but slave!—under the mistaken impression that I am keen to defend the "Obama agenda" (whatever that is) just because I happen not to be chewing on a drumstick or swallowing a mouthful of egg nog at some particular moment. Alas! The Obama agenda (or Michael Steele's insistent denunciation of same) is not even a likely candidate for my attention when candied yams are in sight. So, if you want to debate the merits of Michael Steele, can I please finish eating these candied yams first? Please?

3. Boulevard: A Novel, Bill Guttentag.
This is the first novel by the executive producer of the NBC show Crime & Punishment, which I've never seen, but hear is related to Law & Order, so that means this book definitely has to be dark, and noirish, and able to resolve itself quickly, and that its characters will speak in short. declarative. bursts.

4. The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire, Second Edition, by Mari Sandoz.
Need I say more?

5. Just Kids, by Patti Smith.
Somewhere, in an alternate universe with alternate laws of physics and an alternate empirical relationship between cause and effect, there is an alternate version of me who loves Patti Smith, and owns every one of her albums, and prefers her version of "Because the Night" to Natalie Merchant's cover, and understands how exactly she got famous, and thinks every minute of her fame is deserved, and can't wait until she produces another LP (or book of poetry or tell-all autobiography), and who sings along with her songs as he makes that dreaded trip from Smalltown, U.S.A. to the New York City, a.k.a. the Big Apple. In this alternate universe, it's unlikely that this alternate version of me saw Patti Smith play a Ralph Nader rally in 2000.

A belated answer key to our Rolling Stone: Parse that Platitude contest!

• There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place, who create a euphoria within themselves. PLATITUDE REFERS TO: Elvis Presley
  
• You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And [blank] is a gift from God. PLATITUDE REFERS TO: Aretha Franklin
  
• There’s a lot going on in [blank]’s voice. A lot of pain, a lot of life but, most of all, a lot of strength. PLATITUDE REFERS TO: Etta James
  
• [Blank]’s unhinged aggression presaged punk rock. PLATITUDE REFERS TO: Jim Morrison
  
• I can’t compare [blank]’s voice to anything — [blank] had such an unusual breadth of influences, from Sonic Youth to Edith Piaf. PLATITUDE REFERS TO: Jeff Buckley
  

Commenter "Elisabetta" wins for accuracy, with a 20% accuracy rate. Commenter "Dean Steve" wins for most original entry, with an 80% humor rate.

Winners entitled to free copy of City Paper, redeemable at any of our many distribution hubs across the greater D.C. metro area.