ABSTRACT
The South has long occupied center stage in popular and scholarly understandings of American music. From the music of enslaved laborers from Africa and slave owners and immigrants from England and elsewhere in Europe; to instrumental and song traditions brought from England, Scotland, and Ireland to Appalachia; to the blackface minstrelsy that dominated nineteenth-century popular culture; to the myriad popular musical forms that emerged and cross-pollinated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the story of American music has been largely a story about the South. At the same time, this story is not a unified or simple one. By the nineteenth century, musical representations of southern themes, topics, and locales were dominated by the sentimental fantasies of northern publishing houses, who trafficked in depictions of an imagined pastoral South. Those fantasies, in turn, spread throughout both North and South, and southerners assimilated, reproduced, adapted, and transformed this material, making it their own. To come to terms with the history of southern music is to understand it as structured by the interplay between North and South, commercial and “folk,” as well as “black” and “white.”
