Roustabouts, Steamboats, and the Old Way to Dixie: The Mississippi River and the Southern Imaginary in the Early Twentieth Century

Between 1894 and 1926 there is a profound gap in our understanding of the cultural life of the Mississippi. Those dates represent the publication of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain’s last major statement on the river, and Edna Ferber’s Show Boat, a novel which, along with its many adaptations, shaped the popular image of the river for decades to come. Yet the fact that these texts and authors so dominate our vision of the Mississippi obscures the fact that in the decades that separate them, the river, in a period of significant change, retained a power in popular culture. The early twentieth century proved to be a particularly fertile period for the Mississippi’s symbolic value in the South, in America, and in the wider world. At the moment that the steamboat trade finally met its end, the river was the subject of novels, travel accounts, and songs that worked to reshape its meaning.

In Twain’s wake, and in anticipation of Ferber, a variety of writers, travelers and musicians ensured the Mississippi a multivalent and ambiguous place in the Southern imaginary in the early twentieth century and beyond. Put simply, depictions of the river were central to the interpretation and representation of the South in this period. Major Southern writers like George Washington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfree and Ruth McEnery Stuart all turned to the river in late-career works, their stories of the Mississippi still shaped by the dislocations and devastations of Civil War and Reconstruction. Alternatively, the Mississippi provided Northern travelers, in a variety of accounts published in the major illustrated journals of the period, with a representative journey not only into a nostalgic, mythic South, but into the antebellum past, too. Accompanying and flowing out of these textual accounts the Mississippi featured significantly in songs about the South which carried the river around the globe.

In light of these disparate representations of the river, the steamboat and the roustabout loomed particularly large as the avatars of the Mississippi which seemed to encapsulate its meaning at this moment. Antiquated, obsolete, stagnant; a former symbol of wealth and industry now characterized by poverty, nostalgia and romance; a space powerfully defined by racial hierarchy: the steamboat still plying its trade (or simply decaying) on the Lower Mississippi, and the roustabout still loading and unloading her cargo—all became perfect synecdoches for the South in popular culture at this moment. Yet for all that these varied narratives were characterized by a romantic, retrospective and elegiac quality, they also contained, in a variety of ways, glimpses of the river’s future as a space of liberation from the pressures of the modern world—escape rather different from a retreat into an antebellum nostalgia. If minstrelsy dominated the interpretation of the river in popular musical terms, these were also the years when the pioneering developments of jazz and blues were incubating along the river. In what follows, then, I trace the shifting shape of the imagined Mississippi in this vital and neglected transitional period when it began to carve out a new course in the popular imagination.

“Old Lady Mississippi”

As the twentieth century began, the Mississippi River steamboat was a lost cause; the river itself didn’t seem far behind. The steamboat trade had been under threat from a combination of the railroads, low water, floods and other obstructions to navigation for decades; the internal combustion engine was about to hammer the final nail in its coffin. Between 1870 and 1910, there was a seventy per cent reduction of steamboat tonnage between St. Louis and New Orleans; by 1909, there was no longer a direct packet service between those twin poles of the lower Mississippi (Hunter 637, 639). What remained was a mere shadow of the steamboat’s mid-century apotheosis. As Louis Hunter concluded, in his definitive history of the industry: “Steamboat traffic was [. . .] reduced to a minor movement of package freight and farm products to and from the larger river cities and a highly localized, short-distance flow of goods...