Have to agree. Joan isn’t the best interpreter of other people’s material, it gets homogenized.
Otherwise, it seems like some people in this thread are confusing creative writing with journalism.
Well, we don’t know exactly how long after the war Virgil is thinking/singing.
It has always been the South, and still is.
That’s the day Jefferson Davis was captured. It’s not entirely wrong to call it the end of the Confederacy.
[QUOTE=Alessan;21136764)Now, maybe by"Old Dixie" he’s referring to the land and its people, and not to the political entity. I don’t know. Is Dixie the South, or is it the Confederacy?[/QUOTE]
The former, most assuredly.
There are dozens of early (pre-bebop) jazz recordings by black artists that wistfully imagine goin’ back down to dear old Dixie. It was Home.
Of course, what they missed was Mom and her yummy red beans and rice, not the overt racism.
You’re happy to keep monuments glorifying slavery? Slavery is your idea of a good time? If you want history, where’s your memorial to Benedict Arnold? Where’s your Union Jack?
All the people were singing and all the bells were ringing - yeah, in the North.
More specifically, those monuments were erected to remind the coloreds to keep in their place. They were also part of a movement to claim that the war was about states’ rights instead of slavery - that’s the *real *whitewashing of slavery and the rebellion, it is the *real *erasure of history, and it is long overdue to end.
And most of those songs were straight out of the old black-and-white minstrel shows (or the tradition of those shows), where the songs were written and often performed by white people. And *for *white people. Stephen Foster probably deserves much of the credit and/or blame for popularizing the more saccharine strain of quasi-Dixie nostalgia songs; Foster of course wrote all those songs from his Southern plantation in… Pittsburgh.