Song of the Day 7/1: Tom Lehrer, “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”

First Kinky Friedman, then Martin Mull. It could be one of Friedman’s mysteries, about someone bumping off the musical satirists of the ’70s. In that scenario we should maybe worry about the greatest musical satirist of the ’60s, Tom Lehrer, who’s still with us at age 96. He wrote this one in 1960, when the Civil Rights Act was still a distant dream, yet the attitude he mocks remains fairly common.

Lehrer’s black humor offended some of people in his day – his sales soared when the BBC banned 10 of the 12 songs on his debut album – and Lehrer, who had a day job as a university lecturer on mathematics, loved it. In the line notes to a later LP he proudly reprinted a quote from a New York Times review, “Mr. Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”