Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (review)

Candace Bailey has taken on an important topic of interest to many in the fields of southern history, women’s history, and music history. Those familiar with southern history know that wealthy white women enjoyed and studied music, played piano or sang, and maybe even composed, but even the experts among us probably know relatively few of the details about music in southern women’s lives. Bailey fills in this gap, which is important given that music was a critical part of southern feminine refinement. How was music taught, and by whom? What did performance mean, and how was it executed within the confines of white southern ladyhood? And how did white southern women’s involvement with music change during the Civil War?

A professor of music history, theory, and piano, Bailey engages these questions and many others in this careful study. She argues that women played music to entertain, comfort, and, most important, to please others, something that was part of being a useful, good southern woman. Music education and skill also defined women as educated and upper class. Bailey makes a strong case that proper antebellum southern women did not generally engage in public performances, although sometimes they could help provide church music, and she examines various aspects of women’s learning and performing music at home. Bailey also delves deeply and with obvious expertise into music education in southern schools and provides enticing lists of music performed at various school commencements. Readers might wish, as I do, that the book had a companion webpage with links to the songs that would allow the music to come to life rather than sit silently on the book pages. Here, too, the author might have helped readers understand what the songs meant and how they sounded to the women who performed them and to those who listened.

According to Bailey, the Civil War changed southern women’s relationship to music in ways that reflected altered assumptions about gender. Before the war, women played piano and sang as a means of establishing refinement, and proper young women had to exercise caution about how they played and sang because pleasing others was always the principle goal. And although southern women composed music before the war, they did not put their names on their compositions until the Civil War, when doing so became useful to the cause. Bailey’s argument hinges significantly on her last chapter. Here she has promised to show how, during the war, southern women—even elite ladies—composed and performed music in a public way, reexamining and challenging traditional codes of behavior. Remarkably, women composed music to express their Confederate ideologies and passions and performed it publicly without appearing unladylike. Although it is beyond the scope of the book, readers may wish that there was a bit of speculation about what became of Bailey’s Confederate composers after the war. Did they continue to compose and claim their work in public forums, perhaps in service to the Lost Cause?

Drawing largely on the most well-known southern women, including Mary Boykin Chestnut, the Pinckney women, the North-Petigrus (all of South Carolina), Gertrude Clanton Thomas, and Sarah Morgan, Bailey deserves praise for blending a history of music with a history of the “Southern Belle.” However, this is not a far-reaching examination of sources from across the South.

Music and the Southern Belle does several things very well. It answers previously unanswered (and perhaps unasked) questions about how music was taught and performed in the South. Bailey also interprets what music meant for white southern society, particularly in light of gender and class, and explains how the Civil War created a space for change and for women’s increasingly public role in music. Her conclusions fit with what historians such as Drew Faust and Anya Jabour, from whom she draws heavily, have said about southern women. Bailey’s subjects are conservative, dutiful, refined southern...