Reinventing Dixie by John Bush Jones

Author:John Bush Jones [Jones, John Bush]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Music, History & Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780807177358
Google: 50RIEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2022-04-01T00:28:31+00:00

Authentic Southerners, White and Black

The chapter on southern social types shows how the Alley’s Dixie tunes portrayed hillbillies and happy darkies more like cartoon characters than any real folk who ever walked the earth below the Mason-Dixon Line. Not so for a handful of songs portraying realistic poor whites and southern blacks with clarity and specificity. Though few in number, some of these songs had considerable success.

One of them was written to be sung as if by a southern poor white male and a second by a poor white or black of either gender, though the drawing on the original sheet music cover shows an elderly black man standing outside his cabin. (But sheet music art is notoriously misleading about what’s behind it.) The song realistically depicting the life of a poor white was “Along Tobacco Road” (Edward B. Marks, 1935), with Tina Glenn’s words and Jesse Greer’s music. It was inspired by Jack Kirkland’s long-running Broadway hit Tobacco Road, based on Erskine Caldwell’s novel. The original sheet music cover featured a photo of James Barton as Jeeter Lester, who in 1934 succeeded Henry Hull as the dirt-scratching, foul-mouthed, Georgia tobacco sharecropper. “Along Tobacco Road” is a homesickness song that begins, “Homesick, Lonely, Tired of all that I see,” but the home the singer longs for is a far cry from the idyllic spots in the next chapter’s songs. It’s a place where “life means plantin’, where life means slavin’, / Where life gives what you’ve sowed. / … / Tho’ you’re hungry and worn, clothing shabby and torn, / You smile but never complain. / So you plough and you plough, … / ’Til your body is doubled with pain, / Yet you ask no reward, in your pray’r to the Lord, / But forever here to remain.”

The sheet music cover aside, there’s nothing in Mort Dixon’s lyric for “River, Stay ’Way From My Door,” with Harry Woods’s music (Shapiro, Bernstein, 1931), to indicate whether the singer is a poor white or a black, or even male or female; indeed the top-selling recording was Kate Smith’s with Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians on Columbia in 1931. Her beautifully sung and moving rendition can be heard on the Internet. Other popular 1931 records of the song were made by Phil Harris on Victor and the Boswell Sisters on Brunswick, all of them white, and the great black singer/actor Paul Robeson on Victor. Arguing that the persona in the piece was intended to be a poor white is that, unlike the following songs to be sung by southern blacks, this first-person lyric employs no ethnic accent or dialect, or substandard English. Entirely in the first person, a poor elderly southerner apostrophizes to what he calls “just a lonely little river,” making it clear he doesn’t live on the banks of the Mississippi. Nor does the song reflect the Great Flood of 1927. Still, the singer knows rivers can overflow their banks, so he begs, “I don’t bother you / Don’t you bother me.

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