GRGR(4) Re: Cherokees/Blacks/Hank Williams, etc.

[Doug Millison]

At 2:50 PM -0600 6/16/99, Robert Norton wrote:
>But you don't remember correctly. Kawlija was no princess and Charley Pride
>is no Hank Williams, who wrote and recorded the definitive version.

Glad that you and others were able to augment my faulty memory. Given the
huge hit Charley Pride had with the song, it's possible that more people
have heard his recording  than the original Hank Williams version. A black
man singing a sentimentalized story about caricatured American Indians,
cigar store Indians at that -- not a bad symbol of the expropriation of a
subjugated, colonized, and nearly exterminated people by the winners for
crass commercial purposes.  Like TRP's use of "Cherokee" for the dancing
delight of upper-class white youth in GR, another example of sugar coating
otherwise unpleasant cultural truths in the context of a mass media
manipulated for God knows what ungodly ends.

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