About this item
Highlights
- Listen as you read!
- About the Author: Carrie Tipton is a musicologist who writes, teaches, and lectures about US vernacular music.
- 320 Pages
- Music, History & Criticism
Description
About the Book
The seismic social, economic, and cultural shifts that unfolded in the South in the twentieth century, as reflected through the history of SEC football fight songsBook Synopsis
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.Review Quotes
"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
"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
About the Author
Carrie Tipton is a musicologist who writes, teaches, and lectures about US vernacular music.