Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South by John Bush Jones (review)

In Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South, John Bush Jones considers what made southern-themed songs so popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the imagery and setting of the lyrics, Jones’s resulting work is an unabashed love affair with such southern “memories.”

The book opens in New York City, where, Jones explains, the origins of America’s songwriting industry lie. He goes to great lengths to try and dispel a persistent argument that most of the authors of southern-themed songs were Jewish immigrants. Starting with a collection of 140,000 pieces of sheet music, Jones identifies some 1,079 “Dixie tunes” written between 1898 and 1958 (p. ix). Jones then notes that only about 20 percent of the lyricists and about 27 percent of the composers were Jewish. Yet he does admit that Jews owned the publishing houses and that Jewish songwriters wrote more hits, such as George Gershwin and Irving Caesar’s “Swanee”—although Jones fails to say exactly how many. Furthermore, Jones notes that interfaith collaborations resulted in such iconic songs as “Are You From Dixie? (’Cause I’m From Dixie Too),” with lyrics by the Jewish Jack Yellen and music by the Christian George L. Cobb. Jones’s most useful contribution is his identification of the handful of African Americans in Tin Pan Alley.

Chapters follow that explore the idyllic South in popular song over sixty years. Readers of this journal will wonder why Jones omits such southern states as Maryland, Missouri, and Texas. Jones’s defense of the lyrical use of the term darkies will trouble many. Others will cry foul as he dismisses “coon songs” as inappropriate subject material for his analysis. Rather, Jones evaluates roughly 1,000 lyrics—but not the music—dividing songs into categories for analysis. With this methodology he organizes the songs by themes such love, homesickness, and motherhood (of course here it is “mammy”), as well as regionally distinct sentimentality, hospitality, and southern stereotypes using antebellum definitions he borrows from Daniel R. Hundley of the gentleman, the belle, poor white trash, and “happy darkies” (p. 79).

In the last two chapters Jones argues his case for Tin Pan Alley songwriters’ reinvention of the South, not through lyrics that described the Old South of slavery and plantations, or Lost Cause myths. Instead songwriters crafted a new “Moonlight and Magnolias” myth of “a contemporary land of perpetually sunny days, moonlit nights, fragrant blossoms, Southern Belles, southern hospitality, and happy darkies singing soothing melodies, with all the lush and lovely trappings that go along with them” (p. 210). By positing these lyrics as pictures of a present-day South, Jones contests the interpretation of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, 2011), in which Karen L. Cox delineates the persistence of an antimodern, agrarian—indeed imaginary—antebellum South in the mind of an industrializing America as seen through escapist popular culture.

Certainly Jones demonstrates the hold of romantic notions of the South on Tin Pan Alley, but an ahistoricism clouds his analysis. As James C. Cobb and others have argued, continuity marks that mythic South whether antebellum, postbellum, or contemporary with Tin Pan Alley. Those offensive “coon songs” Jones avoids served as the bridge between minstrel shows and vaudeville, between the plantation melodies of Stephen Collins Foster and L. Wolfe “Wolfie” Gilbert’s “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” And unlike Irving Berlin and those successful Alley songwriters who never stepped west of the Hudson, at least Foster—who originated many of the southern tropes others would recycle—actually traversed the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Regardless of authenticity, Reinventing Dixie recalls in all its glory an important chapter in the Great American Songbook.