The Outer Banks of the Mighty Mississippi

A Musical Odyssey

The long and adventurous journey of the Mississippi River basin

?Antebellum

"Antebellum" means "before the war," but it wasn't widely associated with the?U.S. Civil War?(1861-1865) until after that conflict was over. The word comes from the Latin phrase "ante bellum" (literally, "before the war"), and its earliest known print appearance in English dates to the 1840s.

In our second installment we will discuss Antebellum alone the Mississippi River and continue our Musical Odyssey.

The musical life of antebellum south is remarkable not so much for its originality—much of the music was heard nationwide—but for its diversity and the extent to which it permeated the lives of the citizenry.

In 1800 antebellum south was still singing “Yankee Doodle” with nationalistic pride in the streets. Sixty years later they were whistling “Dixie.” The songs stand as musical bookends to the antebellum period and illustrate the monumental and wrenching change from the youthful cockiness of a union newly formed to the calamity of disunion. Between these touchstones, a great wealth of many types of music developed.

Theater was the primary source of entertainment. Wealthy planters, middle-income farm families, day workers, and in some cases, enslaved people standing in the rear of the theater paid the admission price, ranging from twenty-five cents to one dollar, to see operas and dramas. Operas by European composers presented through-out the south. Included were interpolated popular songs of the day. The same was true of nonmusical dramas.

Concerts of vocal and instrumental music flourished in antebellum South, particularly in New Orleans, though they were held in smaller towns as well. Much of the music and many of the performers were heard in cities throughout the United States. The repertory was dominated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European composers, and the most-heralded concerts were those offered by traveling European performers.

Piano and other instrumental works of such nineteenth-century European composers as Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Berlioz do not appear on the programs of concerts throughout the entire antebellum period, though these composers were widely celebrated in Europe. The instrumental forces available at the time precluded performances of symphonies by Beethoven and Berlioz and other large-scale concertos. Even the late symphonies of Haydn and Mozart were beyond the reach of the instrumental resources at that time.

The?field holler?is a type of formless, and sometimes wordless?vocal?expression used by?slaves?in the cotton fields of the "Deep South", especially in the?Mississippi Delta, to communicate or to vent feelings, hence the name "field holler". It is closely related to the?call and response?of?work songs, prison?chain gangs, railway gangs, Afro-American?spirituals?and ultimately to?African American music?in general such as the?blues?and the?rhythm and blues.

The field holler may in turn have been influenced by blues recordings. No recorded examples of hollers exist from before the mid-1930s, but some blues recordings, such as?Mistreatin' Mama?(1927, Negro Patti) by the harmonica player?Jaybird Coleman, show strong links with the field holler tradition

A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s.

Throughout the antebellum period?New Orleans was the largest city in the South, the fifth largest in the United States, and the nation's major urban center on the western frontier. It was a commercial rather than an industrial city and had few districts where only one ethnic or economic group lived and worked.

In the three decades before the Civil War, immigrants from the Northern United States flooded into New Orleans in search of new economic opportunities. These newcomers brought to the Southern city many elements of Northern life, such as Protestant churches, English-language newspapers, public schools, and distinct political views. They also brought with them musical practices specific to that region: Protestant church music, amateur choral societies, instrumental concerts, music publication, and English-language opera all flourished from the late 1830s until the late 1850s. This dissertation situates the musical practices of New Orleans during the decades preceding the Civil War within the larger context of American music history. Through an examination of new archival evidence, it demonstrates how these “Americans” the term used at the time to distinguish the city’s English-speaking residents from its French-speaking inhabitants—recreated a musical culture like those they left behind in the North. These New Orleans residents participated in the burgeoning national system of sheet music publication, introduced musical instruction into the city’s newly minted public schools, and developed a performance tradition of sacred concert music like those in Boston and New York. Examining these aspects of New Orleans’s musical past offers important lessons about the nature of American musical identity in the antebellum era and sheds new light on the far-reaching influence of Northern culture in the age of Jacksonian democracy and westward expansion.

Blues & Jazz - The most accurate way to describe the relationship between the two would be?brothers. They grew up together in the Mississippi Delta, with blues having a degree of influence over jazz. The two share the common parentage of the music of African American communities in the deep South during the post Antebellum era.