Overview

In an era in which collegiate monuments physical (the University of North Carolina's Silent Sam statue) and aural (the University of Texas's use of ""Eyes on Texas"") are being scrutinized on a national stage, From Dixie to Rocky Top explains how so much history became embedded in Southern football culture and reflects on how Southern universities reckon with their troubling icons, symbols, and songs. The project took author Carrie Tipton deep into the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the Southeastern Conference. It also draws on historic newspapers, magazines, recordings, football programs, scrapbooks, photographs, and sheet music accessible in online databases and print sources. In interpreting the primary source data, the book draws on approaches and secondary literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. From Dixie to Rocky Top traces and analyzes the history of SEC football fight songs over a turbulent century. The book chronicles iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception, weaving a compelling narrative around a repertory virtually unexplored by scholars.

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9780826506399

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"""Tipton has written a book that challenges accepted stories, complicates received wisdom, and situates an important repertoire within US popular culture of the last century or more."" --Travis D. Stimeling, author of Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City"

"Amid yet another conference realignment saga, Tipton offers a vibrant, timely reminder of how the SEC's boisterous fight songs and rally cries remain steeped in a regional specificity comprised of far more than the pageantry, precision, and patriarchy of Southern football culture.""—Courtney M. Cox, co-director of The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society ""From Dixie to Rocky Top is the book about Southeastern Conference football that you never knew you needed. Carrie Tipton’s examination of the evolution of the music sung and played at football games, and which became an integral part of college culture, is eye opening history. As she demonstrates, this genre of music was not always benign. “Dixie,” for example, was both an expression of the Lost Cause and a bulwark to racial inclusivity. The book's significance is tied to the fact that Tipton takes popular music seriously. From minstrelsy to ragtime and beyond, music derived from popular culture connected people to one another and to the colleges and football teams she writes about. From Dixie to Rocky Top is also accessible and entertaining, so it surely will find an audience with the larger public, as well as a place in college classrooms.""—Karen L. Cox, author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture ​""Tipton has written a book that challenges accepted stories, complicates received wisdom, and situates an important repertoire within US popular culture of the last century or more.""—Travis D. Stimeling, author of Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City"

Author Information

Carrie Tipton is a musicologist who writes, teaches, and lectures about US vernacular music.

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