Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley's Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South

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...