Song of the Day 1/1: Ferko String Band, “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers”

With luck, the cancellation of the Mummers Parade this year should forestall yet another blackface incident, but let’s face it — mummery’s roots are intertwined with minstrelsy’s, and not everybody is OK with that. Ferko String Band found that out in 2013 when the went with the theme “Bringin’ Back the Minstrel Days.” What they brought down instead was a storm of controversy.

It’s unavoidable that all the “traditional” songs performed by Mummers string bands sprang from minstrelsy. “Oh Dem Golden Slippers,” for example, the parade’s unofficial theme song, was written in 1889 by African-American songwriter and minstrel show singer/banjo player James Bland as a parody of an earlier spiritual called “Golden Slippers.” It was so popular it became a bluegrass standard, which means it penetrated to the deepest hollers in Appalachia, so it was a familiar tune for string bands during their heyday in the early days of the 20th century.

Here’s how it sounded when Vernon Dalhart recorded it in 1928. Those lyrics gwine to get you cancelled in this century.

As an instrumental, though, there’s no reason to object, which is why it’s in the repertoire of both bluegrass and Mummers string bands. Back in the post-war period, when the Ferko String Band (founded in 1922) made a string of LPs and even reached the singles charts with a couple of songs, they recorded this lush arrangement.

In case you were wondering, here’s the original spiritual that Bland was parodying.