A sometime thing: The history of 'Porgy and Bess,' as complex as the history of race in America:
Between the lines of the brief debate that ensued from Sondheim’s temper tantrum, one side seemed to be arguing that the 1935 opera book written by a well-meaning white Southerner was racially insensitive by contemporary standards, and the other side that tampering with a classic text for such reasons was kowtowing to the most humdrum sort of political correctness. Nobody came out of this debate unscarred.
Bio: Francis Davis is a former Contributing Editor of The Atlantic, a columnist for The Village Voice, and a 2008 Grammy Award winner for his album notes to the 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. His seven books include The History of the Blues and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader.
