Southern filibuster. This is an instrumental tune. No words. It's a joke. Get it? In 1971, Tut recorded this, after years of southerners filibustering civil rights legislation. The filibuster meant having southern Senators talk civil rights legislation to death. Yes, there were other filibusters, but that was the main use at the time.
So... here's Tut, playing and not saying a word. It's a joke. Is it funny, or is it too dismissive of the damage done by actual southern filibusters?
Today, an old, southern, white guy making a joke like that? No way.
What do we do with this? Tut was a great musician. Was he actually racist? I don't really know. What did he truly think of Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster? I don't really know.
All we have is the title of this tune. It is crass at best.
Are you going to click on it and listen? It's great music. Do we just say that Tut was a product of his time, and not conditioned to think about this stuff? Might he really have been hardcore racist? Maybe!
At best, this is a crass joke, dismissive of the actual damage done by the real southern filibusters.
It's still an instrumental tune, and if you didn't know the title, and just loved bluegrass, it would bring a smile to your face.
And Tut played on one of the greatest bluegrass albums of all time-- John Hartford's Aereo-Plain. If you don't listen to this, do you stop listening to Tut's solo recordings entirely? Do you stop listening to John Hartford?
Yeah, "Southern Filibuster." Real funny, Tut. I bet all of those "black friends" you supposedly had laughed really hard at it.
And yet, it's great music.
I hope nobody is turning to me for answers on this shit. Like I said on Friday, I'm just some asshole, ranting at the void. Here's Tut. He was somewhere between "racist" and "oblivious." I have no way to determine where he was on that scale. Your mileage may vary. Wow, that was a longer wind-up than usual for a simple music post.