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

Why Dixie? This is the question that motivated author and historian John Bush Jones to write his book Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South. The question emerged from a project in which Jones analyzed the lyrics and subject matter of sheet music in the John Hay Library, a special collections library at Brown University in Rhode Island. During his examination of the 140,000-piece collection, Jones discovered roughly 900 works about Dixie. However, the depictions of Dixie in these songs were not contemporary, but “idyllic portraits of an idealized South” (p. 11). Further investigation also determined that most of the Dixie songs were written by Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists, also known as Alleymen, the majority of whom lived in the Midwest and had never set foot in the South. How is it that these songwriters could create such a powerful and profitable vision of a land of which they had no personal knowledge? And why is it that consumers purchased them in such high numbers and for such a long time, roughly 1898 to 1958? Reinventing Dixie sets out to discover the answers to these questions and discuss how the music “invented” and perpetuated the notion of an idealized and fictionalized Dixie.

The study of a popularized image of Dixie is nothing new, nor is the discussion of the impact that popular music and Tin Pan Alley had in perpetuating the myth. Stephen J. Whitfield addressed the appeal of Dixie songs for Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists at length in his article “Is It True What They Sing about Dixie?” (Southern Cultures 8, no. 2 [Summer 2002]: 8–37). Whitfield attributes the Tin Pan Alley interest in songs about Dixie to the natural progression from music written earlier about the South by non-native writers, such as the prolific Pennsylvanian composer Stephen Foster (Whitfield, p. 10). He also proposes the idea of a shared empathy in suffering between Jewish immigrants and African American slaves of the South to explain how it was that the Tin Pan Alley songwriters, who were mostly Jewish, could write about the subject in such a powerful way (ibid., p. 21).

In Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Karen L. Cox devotes a full chapter to music about Dixie. Cox writes about the phenomenon of Dixie songs written by northern, Jewish immigrant songwriters of Tin Pan Alley. She credits nostalgia for the South and the interest in “other places” as the inspiration for the popularity of Dixie tunes (Cox, p. 10). Some of Cox’s chapter reiterates Whitfield’s theory of Tin Pan Alley’s attraction to the subject of Dixie as an extension of Stephen Foster’s work. However, Cox also considers the idea that coon songs, which are caricatures of racist African American stereotypes, were predecessors to “back-to-Dixie” songs (ibid., p. 16).

What sets Reinventing Dixie apart from similar scholarship is the comprehensive discussion of sheet music about Dixie through detailed examination of the lyrics. Jones has painstakingly analyzed some 1,080 songs and separated them into seven major categories: sentimentality, stereotypes, southern hospitality, songs about lovers, realism and parody, homesickness and “Mammy Songs,” and southern myths and pride. Jones gives each category a chapter and provides examples of songs that epitomize the topic, being careful to provide the Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists for each title. He then provides historical and musical context for each piece, which will allow for a wide range of research to be undertaken using the book’s content.

Jones states clearly in his preface that there are limitations to his research. The intended audience is general and not academic. Therefore, there are no endnotes or footnotes...