Carry Me Back: Nostalgia for the Old South in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 1-24

  Glazer, Lee ^a   Key, Susan ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012434482     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875800024294     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. In his classic study Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: 1951, 154), C. Vann Woodward observed, “One of the most significant inventions of the New South was the’ Old South’-a new idea in the eighties, and a legend of incalculable potentialities.” Subsequent scholarship has continued to emphasize the importance of the myth of the Old South after the war but also has acknowledged its antebellum roots. See for example Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970), 167-178, and Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, “The Northern Origins of Southern Mythology,” Journal of Southern History 43 (Nov. 1977), 567-82. Gerster and Cords are particularly significant for their recognition of the role of Northern popular media such as novels, sheet music, and illustrations in establishing the credibility of Southern mythology, identifying a number of factors that contributed to Northern idealization of the South, most importantly: “swift change and the social mobility of a new class of [Northern] expectant capitalists… [led to] a flirtatious attitude toward stable mythical images” (573), “the solid values of agrarianism” (574), and “[Northern] guilt over slavery and its repressed attitudes on race relations” (574).
2. Both Louis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983) and Michael O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) have analyzed the development of a Southern self-image. Simpson's work is concerned primarily with the alienation resulting from the attempt to reconcile a pastoral myth with the realities of slavery, while O'Brien asserts the existence and variety of intellectual production in the antebellum South. Both writers are therefore concerned with high culture. This essay is concerned with cultural production that manipulates many of the same pastoral images, but reworked for and dependent on mass consumption.
3. Leonard Feist, An Introduction to Popular Music Publishing in America (New York: National Music Publishers’ Association, Inc., 1980) 24. For a fuller discussion of American music publishing see D. W. Krummel and Stanley Sadie, eds. Music Printing and Publishing (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
4. For a history of the early parlor song, see Nicholas E. Tawa, Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans: The Parlor Song in America 1790-1860 (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1980).
5. Unsigned, “Notes of Music,” The Musical Advocate and Singer's Friend 2:21 (March 1861) 294.
6. See Susan Key, “Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of Stephen Foster,” American Music 13 (Summer 199;), 145-66.
7. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 33.
8. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 73.
9. Lewis P. Simpson, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America., 43.
10. See William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks at Home”: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours, 2nd edn. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) for further discussion of Foster's various social and musical contexts. A classic biography is John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster: America's Troubadour (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1940). Both books include substantial references to period criticism.
11. Deane Root, “The ‘Mythtory’ of Stephen C. Foster or Why His True Story Remains Untold,” American Music Research Center Journal 1 (1991), 34.
12. Quoted in Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), 230.
13. It should be noted that Negro Life at the South was prompted by Johnson's observation of black life in the alleys of Washington, D.C. The scene, however, suggests a more rural setting, a suggestion borne out by the picture's later title, Old Kentucky Home. In American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 127-131, Elizabeth Johns observes that Negro Life at the South “both concludes the antebellum tradition and serves as a fulcrum for work after the Civil War” (127). Although Johns directs this remark toward the way that the stereotyping of blacks influenced such pre-War events as the Dred Scott decision and would be invoked in the development of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, the continuous and, in Johns's words, “portentous” (127) quality of Johnson's work is also valid in the context of this essay, as will be argued below.
14. Susan Key has made a number of these points about the relationship between nostalgia and musical style in “Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of Stephen Foster.”
15. Peter Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
16. Roger Fiske, Scotland in Music: A European Enthusiasm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, ix.
17. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901, c. 1883), 575.
18. The Civil War itself directly challenged the antebellum myth; Northern desire for the Old South temporarily abated as songwriters on both sides of the conflict celebrated the glories of their respective causes. Both sides also brought nostalgia for lost loved ones into the parlors of those waiting at home. Our investigation however, confirmed that this represented a break in a theme which was soon revived in the postwar era.
19. Patricia Hills, The Painter's America: Rural and Urban Life, 1S10-1900 (New York: Praeger Publishing in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974), 75.
20. This information is based on materials in the Rare Book Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.