Question about Authenticity vs. Offensive Language or New Meanings

[Sparkly]

Poll question: Question about Authenticity vs. Offensive Language or New Meanings

I'm looking at republishing old music (early 1900's), geared toward education, with titles such as:

"Gay Holiday"
"Indian War Dance/Love Song"
"Pussy's Contentment"

The music itself is fine and has no words, but the composers didn't intend the double-meanings or offense such titles carry today. It's something I confront a lot. What's the right thing to do, politically and ethically, while staying true to the source? (Would you change them to "Happy Holiday," "Native American Dance," and "Kitty's Lullaby?" Change them but add footnotes with the originals? Leave them as is and let people deal with it?)

(This is related to the perennial questions about Mark Twain's writings, and now the copyright holder's fit over the high school casting Huck Finn cross-racially. How far should authenticity go?
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/s/ap/theater_mark_twain_race )

Your thoughts on the right thing to do?

[Vincardog]

1. Don't do revisionist history. Leave that to the Orwellian Rove

[DrDebug]

2. It is a natural evolution of a language

Words often get a second meaning as time goes by and there is a likelyhood that the second meaning becomes more significant as the first. The only relevant part is the original context. I doubt whether anybody wants to re-edit the speech of Dr. Martin Luther King and replace 'Colored' with 'Black'.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. Sparkly forgot the story of her ex husband who was talking to his

8th grade students about an old play which he gave them to perform. An old Gilbert and Sullivan(?) thing.

One of the characters was a pirate named "One Eyed Dick".

You can imagine how seriously that was taken by the pubescent boys reading it aloud in class.

So yeah .... this can get to be a troubling thing as a purely practical matter.