No dog in this fight. But when I read the lyrics I didn't understand the point of the controversy.
Quote:
"The Eyes of Texas"
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them,
At night, or early in the morn.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
'Till Gabriel blows his horn!
This article helped me understand that the origin of the phrase "The eyes of Texas" the was the primary issue and not the tune's origins in the on campus mistral shows.
Quote:
To trace the history of the tune, you must go back to the late 1860s, when William Prather was a law student at Washington College in Virginia (now called Washington and Lee University). Robert E. Lee was the university president and would frequently remind students that “the eyes of the South are upon you.” According to Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at UT, the saying was Lee’s way of reminding students to work hard and to uphold Southern traditions.
The saying stuck with Prather as he became a lawyer and then eventually a UT regent. By 1899, he was named president of the university and delivered an address to students on the first day of school. According to a 1926
Dallas Morning News column remembering her father, Prather’s daughter said the crowd roared when the president said: “I would like to paraphrase [Lee’s] utterance, and say to you, ‘Forward, young men and women of the University, the eyes of Texas are upon you!” From then on, it became Prather’s catchphrase. His daughter recalled one instance when students were waiting to hear the president speak. “Bet you a quarter he says ‘eyes of Texas’ before he gets through,” one student said to another. He won the quarter.
...
The two students decided to tweak the lyrics to more explicitly pay homage to Prather’s catchphrase. Johnson suggested that they set the lyrics to the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and they eyed an annual campus minstrel show on May 12, 1903, as the right time to debut it, since there would be a large audience, including President Prather. These minstrel shows, which went on until the sixties, were fund-raisers organized by students and featured white performers singing and dancing in blackface.
Given that understanding, it is clearer to me why many have an issue with the song.
And that was before I read the racist alumni comments.
Suffer Well.