Released April 1991 Recorded 1990 Length 4:01 | Format 7", CD, Cassette Genre Heavy metal | |
B-side "Sure Feels Good To Me" | ||
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a song by American rock band Warrant. It was released in April 1991 as the third single from Warrant's second album Cherry Pie. The song charted at #78 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #19 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. In Australia, the single peaked at #85 on the ARIA singles chart in May 1991.
A music video was made for the song, and later the song was re-visited by the band in 1999 on their Greatest & Latest album.
Background
According to frontman Jani Lane, the original working title for the song was "I Know a Secret".
Prior to the writing of the song "Cherry Pie", the album's title and first single was to have been "Uncle Tom's Cabin", a track which foreshadowed the kind of imaginative song writing which would later be more fully revealed on the Dog Eat Dog record. Although named after the classic novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the song tells the story of a witness to the involvement of local police in a double murder and appears at first to have nothing to do with slavery, racism, or the U.S. South (although the video for the song was set in Louisiana). Many fans have speculated that the lyrics could relate to the murders of civil rights activists at the hands of racist police officers that occurred in the U.S. during the 1960s, an example being the "Mississippi Burning" events, but things remain ambiguous.