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"I want to go back to Dixie"
Tom Lehrer

Well, what I like to do on formal occasions like this is to take some of the various types of songs that we all know and presumably love, and, as it were, to kick them when they're down. I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene, or - as they say in New York - "sophisticated". I'd like to illustrate with several hundred examples for you this evening, first of all, the southern type song about the wonders of the American south. But it's always seemed to me that most of these songs really don't go far enough. The following song, on the other hand, goes too far. It's called I want to Go Back To Dixie.

I want to go back to Dixie,
Take me back to dear ol' Dixie,
That's the only li'l ol' place for li'l ol' me.
Old times there are not forgotten,
Whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton,
And waitin' for the Robert E. Lee.
(It was never there on time.)

I'll go back to the Swanee,
Where pellagra makes you scrawny,
And the honeysuckle clutters up the vine.1
I really am a-fixin'
To go home and start a-mixin'
Down below that Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, poll tax2,
How I love ya, how I love ya,
My dear ol' poll tax.

Won'tcha come with me to Alabammy,
Back to the arms of my dear ol' Mammy,
Her cookin's lousy and her hands are clammy,
But what the hell, it's home.

Yes, for paradise the Southland is my nominee.
Jes' give me a ham hock and a grit of hominy.

I want to go back to Dixie,
I want to be a Dixie pixie
And eat corn pone3 till it's comin' outta my ears.4
I want to talk with Southern gentlemen
And put that white sheet on again,5
I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years. 

The land of the boll weevil,
Where the laws are medieval,
Is callin' me to come and nevermore roam.
I want to go back to the Southland,
That "y'all" and "shet-ma-mouth" land,
Be it ever so decadent,
There's no place like home



Pellagra is synonymous with the US South, so well known at one point it entered the popular culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Characterised by the "three D's": Dermatitis, dementia and death, the disease killed a million people in the South between the civil war and the discovery of Niacin in 1931.

"Between 1906 and 1940 more than 3 million Americans were affected by pellagra with more than 100,000 deaths, yet the epidemic resolved itself right after dietary niacin fortification." -Wiki

"In 1937, Conrad Elvehjem, a biochemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, showed that the vitamin niacin cured pellagra (manifested as black tongue) in dogs. Later studies by Dr. Tom Spies, Marion Blankenhorn, and Clark Cooper established that niacin also cured pellagra in humans, for which Time Magazine dubbed them its 1938 Men of the Year in comprehensive science.[39]" - Wiki

"Research conducted between 1900 and 1950 found the number of cases of women with pellagra was consistently double the number of cases of afflicted men.[40] This is thought to be due to the inhibitory effect of estrogen on the conversion of the amino acid tryptophan to niacin,[41] or to the differential and unequal access to quality foods within the household. Some researchers of the time gave a few explanations regarding the difference.[42] As primary wage earners, men were given consideration and preference at the dinner table." - Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra