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  • Music and the Making of the New South
  • Chris Goertzen
Music and the Making of the New South. By Gavin James Campbell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 222, acknowledgments, 29 photographs and illustrations, bibliography, index.)

The precipitous speed of social change in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century rattled Americans of all classes, races, and walks of life. In Atlanta, as Gavin James Campbell explains in his engaging Music and the Making of the New South, citizens coped with their uneasiness in part through their engagement with and their varying responses to three major annual musical events: visits by the New York Metropolitan Opera, the home-grown Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. Only the last-mentioned of these events has previously attracted much attention by scholars, so not only Campbell's analyses but even his descriptions of events are of interest, offering case studies of the musical institutions and their psychological uses.

In this era, marked in the New South by the entrepreneurial zeal of Reconstruction and by Jim Crow statutes, immigration from countryside to city burgeoned in connection with industrialization and rapid growth of all sorts. Tensions between races, socioeconomic classes, and genders channeled broad trends towards economic and educational betterment. Campbell argues that groups of citizens in Atlanta sought or scorned amelioration in characteristic ways. Annual weeklong visits by the New York Metropolitan Opera Company inspired comprehensive, near-hysterical newspaper coverage, a city clean-up, social activities, and a general feeling of high-toned festival. Affluent white women supported the opera (and other art music institutions and events), in part through clubs, which helped lessen isolation in the home but which might also (to the dismay of city fathers) support women's suffrage. Their husbands were required by informal but strict rule to dodge creeping effeminacy by giving evidence of boredom with or mild hostility toward the opera and other art music concerts, but they could nevertheless support the opera as a stimulant to business and as fodder in competition between cities for cultural prestige. Blacks were not allowed to buy tickets.

The Colored Music Festival proved more fragile, not lasting long after a leading organizer left town. An impressive roster of black stars and ensembles performed pieces in both classical genres and spirituals, but whites (who were invited, indeed having their own section of seats) chose to celebrate only the spirituals. They saw spirituals as "authentic," demonstrating a comfortingly separate black culture and symptomatic of a nostalgia that they considered to be shared by both races, while blacks interpreted both their own participation in classical music and the formal and progressive nature of many performances of spirituals as evincing a stake in the ameliorative gilding of the New South.

Many who attended the Georgia Old-Time Fiddling Contest (an annual event from 1913 up to the Great Depression) were recent arrivals in Atlanta from rural areas, but plenty of wealthy white businessmen and other civic leaders enjoyed themselves there too. Campbell claims a degree of surprise that many city boosters loved the rustic events, but I am not sure why that should be the case. These prosperous white men were required by their collective masculinist code to be nervous in the presence of art music, but fiddling was rollicking fun, innocent of insidious intellectual overtones. And the social uses of this music were varied. It was not only whites fiddling, but the right whites—that is, Anglo-Saxons rather than unwashed immigrants, country folk whose women were thought to cleave to traditional roles. The fiddlers themselves, however, had mixed feelings about the homespun, rough-hewn caricatures that the papers claimed they embodied. Some fiddlers did match this image, some were good-naturedly (or cynically) willing [End Page 372] to go along with it, but others saw fiddling as an art form.

Campbell's writing is colorful and light on jargon. This book, a reworked dissertation, retains the virtues and flaws of the parent genre. Documentation—mostly quotations from Atlanta's newspapers of the era—is stunningly thorough and quite entertaining, but the tight focus characteristic of dissertation research allowed little comparison...

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