Sounds American

National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800-1860

Ann Ostendorf

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780820341361
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Sounds American provides new perspectives on the relationship between nationalism and cultural production by examining how Americans grappled with musical diversity in the early national and antebellum eras.

During this period a resounding call to create a distinctively American music culture emerged as a way to bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the new nation. This played out with particular intensity in the lower Mississippi River valley, and New Orleans especially. Ann Ostendorf argues that this region, often considered an exception to the nation—with its distance from the center of power, its non-British colonial past, and its varied population—actually shared characteristics of many other places eventually incorporated into the country, thus making it a useful case study for the creation of American culture.

Ostendorf conjures the territory's phenomenally diverse "music ways" including grand operas and balls, performances by church choirs and militia bands, and itinerant violin instructors. Music was often associated with "foreigners," in particular Germans, French, Irish, and Africans. For these outsiders, music helped preserve collective identity. But for critics concerned with developing a national culture, this multitude of influences presented a dilemma that led to an obsessive categorization of music with racial, ethnic, or national markers. Ultimately, the shared experience of categorizing difference and consuming this music became a unifying national phenomenon. Experiencing the unknown became a shared part of the American experience.

SOUNDS AMERICAN

National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860

ANN OSTENDORF

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Insecurity and Nationalism: The Call to Create a Unified American Music Culture

2 The Threat of Diversity: The Lower Mississippi River Valley as a Case Study

3 The War of the Quadrilles: Ethnic Loyalty and American Patriotism

4 “Other” Musicians: Ethnic Expression, Public Music, and Familiarizing the Foreign

5 Bounding Ethnicity: The Creation and Consumption of Ethnic Music Genres

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures follow page 68

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Reflecting back over the years of working on this project, I can now see the process as a necessary stage for my personal and professional development. However, were it not for the constant supportive presence of many people in my life, the struggles of researching and writing this book would have overwhelmed me. I remained motivated by the collegial atmosphere of Marquette University’s Department of History, whose faculty continued to express sincere interest in my work and well-being in untold ways. I must mention a few particularly special mentors by name. I am grateful to Phillip Naylor, whose reiteration of the significance of perception in history has inspired me ever since I worked as his teaching assistant. I am especially thankful for James Marten, who always went beyond his duties as chair and director of graduate studies in preparing me for my life as a historian. He took seriously every question or concern I had, and I find myself emulating him in my own professional activities and relationships. Finally, I must thank my adviser, Kristen Foster, for her untiring ability to help defuse my anxieties during this process. The balance between her supportive friendship and scholarly advice has been the perfect combination as I pursue my own potentials. I also thank my fellow graduate students, who consistently found time in their own busy schedules to evaluate my work and push me toward fuller scholarly growth.

The financial support provided by Marquette’s History Department, the Cyril Smith Family Fellowship, and the Father Henry Casper S.J. Memorial Fellowship allowed me to immerse myself in my scholarship, and for this I am grateful. I also thank the administration at Gonzaga University for the financial support to see this project to completion, as well as the friendship and mentoring of my new colleagues during this transition into a new professional family. The Gonzaga University students also deserve my appreciation; their participation in discussions of early United States history has already taught me new ways of thinking and explaining.

Numerous librarians and archivists assisted me, especially the Interlibrary Loan Department at Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Library and Gonzaga University’s Foley Center Library. Without them, this would have been a very different project. Others include Lucinda Cockrell and Grover Baker at the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, Deborah Cribbs and Charles Brown at the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri St. Louis, Irene Wainwright at the New Orleans Public Library, Siva Blake and Daniel Hammer at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center, Mimi Miller at the Historic Natchez Foundation, and the entire staff at the Missouri History Museum, Library and Research Center, Tulane University Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Louisiana State University Library’s Special Collections, and the Sainte Genevieve Public Library. I especially thank Dale Cockrell, Frank Nickell, John Keeling, and my long-lost cousin Berndt Ostendorf for their willingness to give of their time to read parts of my work. I also thank all the editors at the University of Georgia Press, but especially Derek Krissoff, whose approachable professionalism has made this first experience with publishing for a young scholar like me much more pleasant than I ever would have expected.

Finally, I thank my family and friends who have put up with me throughout this process. Jodi and Enaya, having two great friends to share the journey with made it all that much easier. The fantastic company of the Maggie Lang, Danielle Carder, and Emily Schall households provided refuge and hospitality during research trips and vacation getaways. I’m sure your vicarious experience of researching and writing has made you all that much more confident in your own career paths. To Mom, Dad, Jill, Mark, and Nick, thanks for empathizing with my work even though it means time away. But my greatest thanks goes out to Rich, for taking care of everything else in my life.

SOUNDS AMERICAN

Introduction

It is the belief men betray and not that which they parade which has to be studied.

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, “ISSUES OF PRAGMATICISM”

During the early decades of the new American nation, intellectuals and cultural commentators were concerned with the question of what it meant to be American. More than a desire to differentiate themselves from Europeans, their anxiety arose out of the belief that the nation’s members lacked any commonalities beyond the shared revolutionary experience. To them, diversity within the nation potentially threatened to undermine the unity they assumed necessary to ensure the successes of this republican experiment. The newly forming political parties, the variety of religious traditions, the contrasting regional experiences, and the ethnic and racial diversity within the nation, all caused insecurity, and thus became problems with which to be dealt. Because this new nation existed in a process of definition, more so than as a singularly definable entity, the nation’s diversities heightened its insecurity as its identity remained in flux. Many wondered, if the character of the United States could not even be defined, what were its chances for survival?¹

As a result, a resounding call to create an American national culture emerged from an array of thinkers as a way to encourage a cohesiveness that would bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the nation.² From voices as diverse as Noah Webster, with his attempt to codify American English soon after the Revolution, to the following generation’s cultivation of an American literary culture by the likes of Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau—all engaged in a dialogue promoting a unique national culture through both explicit and implicit comparisons to what they considered to be non-American ways. The relationship between early Americans’ ideas about national identity and that which they considered no longer, not yet, or never to be included in the nation is a component of early American cultural history that requires further study. According to Elisa Tamarkin, a scholar of early American culture, “We need better to examine how nationalism, as a form of feeling, an ideology, and a set of practices, works every bit as seriously at bringing some aspects of the outside in, as it does at keeping others out.”³ We also need to better understand the seeming paradox that American nationalism developed as peculiarly regional processes. National loyalty and regionally distinctive experiences were two components of most early Americans’ identities.⁴ Yet, which of these diverse experiences could be brought into American culture, and whose ways would be defined as outside the national expression and experience?

The methods these nationalist thinkers used to investigate what it meant, or should mean, to be American, especially the language they used when writing on the topic, reveal that the ethnic and racial diversity of the United States presented a unique issue that needed special consideration as they worked toward developing a national culture. Among their calls for an American language and literature, these self-conscious American nationalists also called for a distinctive American music culture. The language writers used when encouraging the development of a unique national music, as with a national culture in general, exposes their assumptions that a music way was intimately connected to what today would best be called race or ethnicity.

Within this early American music culture, descriptors bound music into clearly identifiable categories embedding the presumption that a music way was a peculiar characteristic of a national, racial, or ethnic group’s members. Commentators variously saw music as an inherited biological trait, a product of the environment, the result of one’s particular education, or a combination of the three.⁵ No matter which characteristic they considered to be strongest, cultural critics believed music to be connected to a person’s specific homeland past and shared with others of the same biology, heritage, and experience.

I use “music way” and “music culture” as umbrella terms to include any expression made through or with music, including those performed and printed. Although at times I use the term “American” in the context of purposefully nationalistic writers’ style of thinking about the nation, I primarily use it as a designator for that which is happening in the United States in a general way. Thus, although the term “American culture” implied specific racial and ethnic associations (among many others categories) to self-conscious cultural commentators, I employ the term inclusively of all people who happened to be living at the time within the United States. As such, my word American does not imply homogenization either as a reality or goal, but rather describes a person inhabiting the unsettled cultural and geographic entity of the early nation. This person was quite often surrounded by, and most likely reacting to, other unsettled people with varying traditions and expectations of their neighbors and nation.

I use the terms “ethnicity” and “race” neither interchangeably, nor precisely distinct from each other. According to Bruce Dain’s study of early nineteenth-century race theory, “Racial concepts did not move tidily from a shallow Enlightenment environmentalism to a deep biology; nor were the two positions mutually exclusive. Nurture and nature intertwined.” The term “race” would have been used in the early nineteenth century to describe what twentieth-century language attempted to separate into categories of race and ethnicity, as well as a word used to describe in a generic way categories of difference. More f...

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• SOUNDS AMERICAN