Music: Missouri’s Song

It was high time, thought State Representative Floyd L. Snyder, that the Missouri Waltz be established as Missouri’s official state song. He introduced a bill to make it so. Then, to be sure all his fellow legislators could hum what they were voting for, he invited the orchestra of Missouri’s Lincoln University (for Negroes) to swing through it for them. There was only one thing Snyder forgot: the lyrics.

From the university’s music-department head, O. Anderson Fuller, came a brisk reminder: “In this song you will find such words as ‘mammy’, ‘pickaninny’ and ‘darkies’, which render any song unfit and unworthy of such a high honor.” Lincoln’s orchestra, he wrote, would have to decline the invitation to play it.

Replied Snyder: “My interest in the song comes not from the text but from the melody.” The Kansas City Star picked up the same tune in an editorial: “Nobody need bother with singing the words because the citizenry—we hope—won’t be expected to remember them anyway.” Last week, Missouri’s lower house apparently agreed, approved Snyder’s bill, 91 to 31.