Reinventing Dixie

Tin Pan Alley, once New York City’s songwriting and recording mecca, issued more than a thousand songs about the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. In Reinventing Dixie , John Bush Jones explores the broad impact of these songs in creating and disseminating the imaginary view of the South as a land of southern belles, gallant gentlemen, and racial harmony. In profiles of Tin Pan Alley’s lyricists and composers, Jones explains how a group of undereducated and untraveled wr