Joel Chandler Harris for Best Original Song. Walter White of the NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film in his telegraphed press release on November 27, 1946, but decried the "impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship." Since its debut, the public perception of Harris and the Uncle Remus stories has largely been tied to the reception of "Song of the South". Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 – July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he
Uncle Remus recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition. Harris himself said, in the introduction to "Uncle Remus", that he hoped his book would be considered: ... a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him. Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his "Autobiography"