[Dixielandjazz] Dixieland Jazz Kash's question about the song, "Dixie."

[JimDBB at aol.com]

Hey, folks, I found the article about "Dixie" that I had wanted to send to 
the list but lost.  Here it is:

This is a great article, Bob.  Thanks for posting it.  I have to make a 
couple of comments.

'Dixie' now too symbolic of old South, not of origins 

Friday, September 04, 1998
By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer <storysumm>


      The song "Dixie" has become identified with significant aspects of 
American history.

     Unfortunately, say several black musicologists, it's for all the wrong 
reasons.

     Because "Dixie" is now synonymous with slavery, racism and hatred, the 
music historians say, it was wise for the Woodland Hills School District to 
postpone this week's scheduled marching band performance of a Civil War 
program that included the song.

     Still, Woodland Hills plans to hold the concert Wednesday, and has no 
plans for now to delete "Dixie" from the program, which includes several 
songs representing the Union and Confederacy.

     But musicologist Josephine Wright made it clear that in her opinion, 
"Dixie" should be dropped.

     "There're too many symbols attached to that song and you can't strip 
them away," said Wright, a professor of music and black studies at the 
College of Wooster in Ohio. "It's a symbol of the old South. I don't know how 
you can clean up 'Dixie."'

     This woman is more of a raceocologist than a musiccologist.  I can't 
imagine a seriousmusicologist making a statements like these.  To force a 
school to drop this historic song from a presentation of history is 
outrageous.


     It would take quite a rehabilitation.

     Originally written by an Ohioan in 1859 for use in a traveling minstrel 
show, it became the anthem of the Confederacy and was played at the inaugural 
of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In the years since, it has assumed 
a life of its own, associated with stereotypes of a conservative, racist 
white South.

     "In all honesty, music is not independent of its culture," said Horace 
Clarence Boyer, a black professor of music theory and African-American music 
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "The white people took it and 
used it to mean something."

     Another stupid statement.
     
Some songs have a broad acceptance, Boyer said, but "Dixie" isn't one of 
them.

     And this.
    
 "You don't have to explain why you're playing 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' 
You don't have to explain why you're playing 'America the Beautiful.' It has 
to be explained why somebody is playing 'Dixie' -- unless it's the Ku Klux 
Klan."

    And this.


     Boyer noted, however, that he personally feels Woodland Hills High 
School could still have a performance that included "Dixie," but only if it 
carefully told the audience ahead of time the reasons for the song's use.

     When Boyer was a U.S. Army recruit at Fort Jackson, S.C., he recalled 
that tradition called for the army band to strike up "Dixie" when the base's 
general made his first appearance.

     "I had to think for a moment about whether I would stand and salute," 
Boyer said, "because I was offended."

      Why should he have been offended?  Becaue dhe was programmed to be 
offended.  there is nothing offensive in the song.
   
  Marva Carter, a black assistant professor of music history and literature 
at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said that if it were possible to 
separate "Dixie" from its politicized associations, "it's not a bad song."

     Aha..."it's not a bad song"  a ray of intelligence and hope.
    
 But whenever ethnic groups protest the playing of types of music, Carter 
said, "usually we're talking about music that's politicized and (produces) 
emotional reactions."

     For example, she said, during the late 1860s and the following decade, 
blacks didn't want to hear Negro spirituals because of the music's connection 
to the period of slavery.

     More recently, Jews have protested the playing of music by German 
composer Richard Wagner, whose operas were co-opted by the Nazis. In fact, 
only this year did the Israeli government allow Wagner's works to be played 
publicly in that country.

     The irony about "Dixie" is that the five-verse song was written by a 
Northerner with little interest in politics, and whose parents were strict 
abolitionists.

     Daniel Decatur Emmett was living in New York City in 1859 writing songs 
for a minstrel troupe. The Mount Vernon, Ohio, native composed hundreds of 
other songs, including "Old Dan Tucker," but none of his other melodies 
packed the same punch as "Dixie."

     The song, like many minstrel show tunes, was critical of authority. It 
speaks of the white plantation master, "Will the Weaver," taking a black 
slave named "Old Missus," who then dies. As the fourth verse warns: "Now 
here's a health to the next old missus ... "

     But most Southerners disregarded the final four verses and concentrated 
on the first one, which is what most people today are familiar with: "I wish 
I was in the land of cotton/Old times there are not forgotten/Look away, look 
away, look away, Dixie's Land."

     "The first verse made it a Southern anthem," said Jon Finson, a white 
professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an 
adjunct professor of American studies. But when the song was written, he 
said, "it was not particularly Southern."

     The minstrel show has been called the first distinct American 
music-theater genre. Whites wore blackface and entertained their audiences 
with crude depictions of black life and music, usually using "black-face 
dialect." Begun in the early 1840s, the shows continued to be popular into 
the 1930s.

     But not all minstrel show were 'black-face...a little matter that has 
been conveniently overlooked.


    I've had my say on "Dixie."  It will probably take someone like Ray 
Charles to do it to make it "Dixie" ok.

    Jim Beebe
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