From Dixie to Rocky Top

Carrie Tipton

Description

Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify.

The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region.

Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture.

This book unearths the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology.

Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.
Fight songs are the most potent and portable of these “shared emblems and experiences,” audible “signs and symbols” of college football culture. Historically disseminated through the dominant channels of the music industry in any given era—sheet music, live performances, recordings, radio, television—fight songs have long moved beyond the boundaries of campus life. In the football-haunted South, these songs have become the hymns of a regional college football culture that scholar Eric Bain-Selbo describes as a religion, the soundtrack of a region that regards sports as “central” to its “modern…identity.”

Despite the significance of college fight songs in southern culture, and U.S. culture more broadly, they figure minimally in academic research. Mentions of fight songs in college football scholarship tend toward the anecdotal and brief: quoting lyrics; stating bare facts of a song’s composition; describing a song’s affective power

In contrast, this book treats SEC fight songs as a cohesive repertory, geographically and historically contingent, bound not by common musical style but by the political, social, and cultural investments of the white South from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries and situated within broader U.S. commercial music history.
 

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: “Hideous with Unearthly Noises”: Early Football Sounds and Spaces
Chapter Two: Songs of the South: Football Music and the Lost Cause
Chapter Three: Who Wrote This? Authorship and Copyright in Two Early Fight Songs
Chapter Four: The Song That Changed Everything and the Man Who Published It: Thornton W.   Allen and the “Washington and Lee Swing” (1910)
Chapter Five: Where Are All the Ladies At?
Chapter Six: Southern Fight Songs in the Jazz Age
Chapter Seven: The Business of College Songs in the 1930s
Chapter Eight: Make It Hot: Pushing for Pep in the 1930s
Chapter Nine: Huey Long’s Band Plays His Songs
Chapter Ten: Three Postwar Fight Songs
Chapter Eleven: What Fades and What Remains
Epilogue: Overtime
Appendix: College Songs Published, Written, or Copyrighted by Thornton W. Allen
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Criticism
• Music of the United States
• Southern Conference
• History of the United States
• History
• Southeastern Conference
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826506412
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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