A certain idea of the South began to form in the early years after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, emerging slowly but ineluctably as white inhabitants of the former slaveholding states created a cultural identity that signified something far more distinctive than mere geography. Even in the three-decade sectional crisis leading up to the war, as historian Charles Reagan Wilson observed, “White southerners began thinking about their society and its role not only in American life but in Western culture….”11xCharles Reagan Wilson, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 32. After the Civil War, and particularly during the Reconstruction era, whites haunted by the specter of “Africanization” feared that the African American population might gain political and cultural dominance in the South. Depicting theirs as a struggle between civilization and primitivism, the forces of Redemption, including the hooded nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, took the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops from the region as license to restore white supremacy not only through intimidation and terror but also through the systematic cancellation of the rights and protections that blacks had won after emancipation, including those stipulated by the three so-called Reconstruction amendments.
But political and legal maneuvers were not the only means by which white southerners reasserted dominion over the black population, large numbers of whom—having been cheated out of even the promised forty acres and a mule—were drawn into a system of sharecropping and debt peonage verging on forced servitude. All that was needed to complete the Redeemers’ project was to create a picture of the South in the romantic image of a genteel, gracious, and heroic past, a picture that would come to be idealized both in high culture and popular culture, from the 1930 manifesto of the Agrarian writers, I’ll Take My Stand, to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, adapted into a blockbuster film in 1939.
Promoted throughout the wider American culture, this touched-up picture of a genteel, white-dominated South relegated black southerners to passive roles in the background, their race having rendered them placeless, stateless, and all but invisible. Blacks were from the South, yet not of it. And their condition of near invisibility was increasingly mirrored in America’s emerging national culture, as the spread of Jim Crow segregation laws culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision effectively reduced blackness to a signifier of disenfranchised “Others.”
Never resigned to their marginalized status, black southerners found ways to cultivate and assert a more affirmative identity, whether through participation in institutions like the black church and mutual aid societies or through the creation of expressive forms of art, humor, and music that allowed them to translate their experience into something that challenged those representations of a passive and culturally dispossessed people. That struggle for dignity took striking form in the Deep South of my home state of Mississippi, where black residents of the Delta region led the way in creating and shaping the musical art form of the blues to resist and even find playful release from the immiserating conditions of the sharecropping life. Emerging in the first decades after the Civil War and drawing on elements of earlier African American field hollers, chants, and spirituals, it was, above all, a music of resistance, a defiant assertion of agency despite exploitation and virtual disenfranchisement.
But that was not how the blues was seen by those who first observed it and told its story to the broader world. In 1901, Harvard anthropologist Charles Peabody initially saw the music that sprang from the levees and cotton fields as representing “the primitive characteristic of patience under repetition.” Others described it as “slave music,” even though it originated a couple of decades after emancipation and would not be standardized or transcribed in sheet music until the early twentieth century. The work of another early investigator, the young Howard W. Odum, took note of the religious strains of the music in a way that tended to emphasize resignation to a hard fate rather than resistance and cheeky subversion.