Music and the Making of a New South
Editorial Reviews
Review
This is an inspired and original work, bringing together three forms of music--opera, African American concert singing, and old-time fiddling--as a way to study conflicts and desires to smooth over those conflicts in the quintessential New South city of Atlanta. (Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi author of American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998)
Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions in Atlanta at the height of the Jim Crow era: the annual visit of the Metropolitan Opera, the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old Time Fiddlers' Convention, demonstrating how music addressed Atlantans' class anxieties and affirmed the segregationist impulse.
Book Description
Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment.
Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turning an evening's entertainment into a struggle between rival claimants for the New South's soul. Opera, spirituals, and fiddling became popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because audiences found them flexible enough to accommodate a variety of competing responses to the challenges of making a New South.
Campbell shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.
Music and the Making of a New South
Music and the Making of a New South,Gavin James Campbell,The University of North Carolina Press,0807855170,19th century,20th century,Atlanta,Atlanta (Ga.),Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General,Gay Studies,Georgia,History,History and criticism,Music,Pop Arts / Pop Culture,Popular Culture - General,Social Science,Sociology,United States - 20th Century,Social Science / African-American Studies,Southern Studies; African-American/African Studies; American Studies; History/United States: Southern
Music and the Making of a New South
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