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“Old Times There Are Not Forgotten”

Southern Traditionalism and American National Development

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Cultural Change and Persistence

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Abstract

This chapter takes its title from Daniel Decator Emmett’s song “Dixie’s Land” written, legend has it, one cold and dreary evening in 1859 from the songwriter’s apartment in New York. “I wish I was in Dixie” became almost overnight a national sensation, its protagonist, an ex-slave, by turns extolling and eulogizing the virtues of the Old South. Lincoln sang it on the campaign trail but so too did Jefferson Davis at his inauguration as president of the Southern confederacy. The song reached its peak of popularity in the half century following the Civil War, one Northern journalist claiming in 1908 that “it was the most popular song in the country, irrespective of section.”1 The words on Emmett’s gravestone, laid 20 years after his death in 1904, convey the song’s enduring contribution to “the romance of reunion,” which by the end of the nineteenth century had replaced the bitter sectional rancor of the postbel-lum period, when the memory of the war was still raw and the old hatreds still ran high.2

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Notes

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Authors
  1. John M. Heffron
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Claremont McKenna College, USA

    William Ascher (Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics) (Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics)

  2. Soka University of America, USA

    John M. Heffron (Professor of history) (Professor of history)

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© 2010 William Ascher and John M. Heffron

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Heffron, J.M. (2010). “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten”. In: Ascher, W., Heffron, J.M. (eds) Cultural Change and Persistence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117334_3

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