Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem by Howard L.Sacks; Judith Rose SacksReview by: Gerald E. ShenkThe Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 393-395Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40030955 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 393

support for experimental New Deal programs and resentment toward federal paternalism, combined with factionalism among the croppers, resulted in a loss of support by 1942. Ironically, the growers viewed the FSA's efforts as a cost-free subsidy to their industry. Similar efforts to work with planters to raise wages by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union ended in failure.

With American entry into World War II, many of the immigrants deserted the cotton fields for better-paying jobs in factories or the armed forces. Failure to entice new immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas resulted in a return to the use of Mexican labor. Only those immigrants who had successfully garnered enough money to buy their own land remained in Arizona. Ultimately, Arizona came to depend once more on Mexicans for the picking of cotton.

Overall, Weisiger's work is a necessary corrective view of the Okies as participants in a routeless immigration west. Her careful analysis confirms an image of a new American peasant class ruthlessly exploited by fellow Americans while weak government instrumentalities tried to ameliorate conditions to little avail.

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Stephen Strausberg

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Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem. By Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993, Pp. xi, 250, acknowledgements, introduction, illustrations, epilogue, appendix, notes, and index. $24.95.)

In the 1820s Ellen Cooper, a ten-year-old slave from Maryland's tobacco region, was taken by her owner into the state of Ohio, thereby becoming free. At about the same time, Thomas Snowden, a twenty- three-year-old slave, also from Maryland, was taken by his owner into Ohio. Eventually, Ellen and Thomas married and raised a family of five children in the town of Mount Vernon. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century they and their children made a living performing music and dance for white audiences throughout central Ohio.

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394 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Sociologist/musician Howard L. Sacks and independent research- er/musician Judith Rose Sacks skillfully tell the story of how the Snowden family negotiated a virulently racist white society in antebellum Ohio while making musical history for both black and white America. The Sackses argue that northern blacks like the Snowdens often expressed in songs their fond memories of family and friends still in slavery. Whites heard and interpreted these as nostalgia for slavery. Popular white song writers such as Stephen Foster and traveling "black- face" minstrels appropriated the language and tone of many such songs, turning them into racial caricatures for the entertainment of white audiences. The authors note that "a long line of white musicians have made their careers by imitating black aesthetics and performance characteristics, and it has been whites who have reaped most of the rewards" (p. 15). This, they say, is the real history of "Dixie," the song that would become known as the "Confederate National Anthem," and which today is considered demeaning to African Americans.

The Sackses offer circumstantial but strong evidence that "Dixie" originated within the Snowden family. They carefully build a case that it expresses the sentiments of an African-American woman living in the North. From Ellen Snowden's strong ties to friends and relatives left in Maryland to the painful cultural ambivalence felt by Ellen's daughter, Annie, (who was forbidden to marry the white man she loved), this account graphically portrays the liminality of life for black women in nineteenth-century Ohio. We are soon persuaded that a black woman in Ohio, whose only memories of slavery were as a young girl, could write a song like "Dixie." The song is thus not so much an idealization of slavery as "a document of black experience in the hostile North," recording "the personal stress of life up North and the grief of separation from family and friends still down South" (p. 171).

The Sackses, white folk musicians themselves, were first drawn to their study of the Snowdens after learning that blacks in Mount Vernon, Ohio, attributed "Dixie" to two Snowden brothers. Further research revealed that Dan Emmett, the white minstrel who first published "Dixie," knew the Snowden family and probably used them as his "authentic negro" source for this and other minstrel songs. The authors settled on Ellen Snowden as the most likely author of the "Dixie" lyrics

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BOOK REVIEWS 395

because of "its possible expression of an African American female perspective on the Southern social world" (p. 174).

Things should have been left at that. The final chapter contains a tedious line-by-line analysis to persuade us that the song reflects Ellen Snowden's nostalgia for specific details of her life as a young slave girl on a Maryland plantation. For example, the Sackses stretch credulity with their analysis of the first line of "Dixie," which reads, "I wish I was in the land ob cotton." They argue that this refers to the Maryland tobacco region in which Ellen Snowden was born. Granted, some small amounts of cotton were grown in nineteenth-century Maryland, and yes, "slaves used cotton for weaving, one of the tasks assigned to young girls, and sewed clothing from cotton raised on the farm" (pp. 174-175). But this hardly made Maryland athe land ob cotton." Moreover, the estate inventory records of the Greer plantation where Ellen Snowden was born do not indicate any cotton-related items (p. 33 n. 20). Attempts to connect other lines to specific experiences in Ellen Snowden's life are no more successful. It is more likely that the Snowdens did with "Dixie" what they apparently did with other songs. They incorporated material that reflected a range of African-American experiences. This, of course, would have included life in the cotton belt.

This book is valuable, not for its answer to the particular question posed by the title, but rather for what it teaches us along the way. The authors have succeeded admirably in fulfilling their general purpose of "linking the everyday experiences of the Snowdens to the broader political, economic, and cultural conditions that framed their lives" (p. 22). It most effectively establishes the connections between the Snow- dens9 musical art and the larger social and cultural contexts of their lives.

Marymount College Gerald E. Shenk Rancho Palos Verdes, California

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