With the lowering of the Confederate battle flag as a major news story, Southern heritage and its mixed messages has become a topic du jour. Turns out that much of the Old South’s moonlight-and-magnolia image was spun not under the shade of pillared plantation houses but on New York’s Tin Pan Alley—mostly by Northerners and often by Jews who never ventured south of the Battery at the tip of Manhattan.
As music historian John Bush Jones relates in Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South (Louisiana State University Press), Al Jolson, who scored a hit with George Gershwin’s “Swanee,” was dismayed when he finally saw the real Swanee River, a muddy trickle. “I said to George, ‘It’s a good thing we wrote the song first,’” he quipped. Jones also points out that the Swanee River cropped up in lyrical contexts far removed from its actual location in southern Georgia and northern Florida. Thanks to the songsmiths, it became almost as mythic as the Mississippi, even if it was harder to locate on a map.
A deeply researched study of the music industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Reinventing Dixie examines the romanticized songs of the South that formed a significant portion of its production. Obscure piece workers knocked out many of those tunes, while others came from the pens of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. To people toiling in the industrialized, commercialized North, the South was depicted as an Arcadia, rural and unspoiled, an idyll for imaginations in need of respite from modernity.
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Jones’ approach is often idiosyncratic. He refers to “darkies” and “pickaninnies” without quotation marks, asserting that those terms were not necessarily pejorative in their original context despite their implicit assumption of superiority. And yet, he draws a useful distinction between odes to Dixie and “coon songs,” a parallel genre whose lyrics (sometimes written and sung by blacks) relates more to the urban North and can be heard as prototypes for rap with their gambling, hard-living protagonists.
