To grow up watching these cartoons was to have the tune hammered into one’s head, especially by Foghorn (“ I say, that’s a joke, son!”) Leghorn. For example, the man who scored Looney Tunes, Carl Stalling, used “Turkey in the Straw” constantly in scenes on farms and especially with chickens and the like. In pop culture of the early twentieth century, that tune is eternally associated with either its inoffensive, nonsensical lyrics or, when performed instrumentally, with farm animals and rural settings.

All evidence points to 'Turkey in the Straw' being what the ice cream companies intended. Johnson makes it sound like the “Turkey in the Straw” version vanished in the wake of the racist ones, but it always existed alongside and has outlived them. There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people.'īut that divorce is indeed possible.

'The first and natural inclination, of course, is to assume that the ice cream truck song is simply paying homage to 'Turkey in the Straw,'' Johnson argues, 'but the melody reached the nation only after it was appropriated by traveling blackface minstrel shows.

Depicting a dancing black man character, the song was called-get ready-' Zip Coon.'Īs interesting as it may be that today's most popular ice crime truck jingle started out as racist abuse set to music, the facts don’t really support it. Johnson, has unearthed “ Nigger Love a Watermelon, Ha! Ha! Ha!,” a most unfortunate version of the song from 1916, and he also points to a nationally famous version that was practically the theme song of the minstrel show for much of the nineteenth century. This week an NPR blogpost went viral teaching us that “Turkey in the Straw,” an American folk song dating to the early 1800s and played by so many ice cream vans today, is actually a hidden racist taunt.

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