Candace Bailey’s exploration of the intertwining worlds of music and gender shows how young southern women pushed the boundaries of respectability to leave their unique mark on a patriarchal society. Before 1861, a strictly defined code of behavior allowed a southern woman to identify herself as a “lady” through her accomplishments in music, drawing, and writing, among other factors. Music permeated the lives of southern women, and they learned appropriate participation through instruction at home and at female training institutions. A belle’s primary venue was the parlor, where she could demonstrate her usefulness in the domestic circle by providing comfort and serving to enhance social gatherings through her musical performances, often by playing the piano or singing. The southern lady performed in public only on the rarest of occasions, though she might attend public performances by women. An especially talented lady who composed music for a broader audience would do so anonymously so that her reputation would remain unsullied.

The tumultuous Civil War years provided an opportunity for southern women to envision and attempt new ways to make themselves useful to the broader, public society. While continuing their domestic responsibilities and taking on new ones, young women also tested the boundaries of propriety in a variety of ways. In a broad break with the past, musical ladies began giving public performances to raise money for the war effort, some women published patriotic Confederate music under their own names, supporting their cause and claiming public ownership for their creations. Bailey explores these women’s lives and analyzes their music. Through their move from private to public performance and publication, southern ladies not only expanded concepts of social acceptability but also gained a valued sense of purpose.

Music and the Southern Belle places these remarkable women in their social context, providing compelling insight into southern culture and the intricate ties between a lady’s identity and the world of music. Augmented by incisive analysis of musical compositions and vibrant profiles of composers, this volume is the first of its kind, making it an essential read for devotees of Civil War and southern history, gender studies, and music.   

Candace Bailey is an associate professor of music history and literature, theory, and piano at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of many articles, as well as the books Seventeenth-CenturyBritish Keyboard Sources and The Keyboard Music of John Roberts.

"For several decades historians studying southern women tended to explore the worlds of plantation mistresses and other mature women, but more recently scholars have begun to examine the social and cultural lives of unmarried women, especially young women, often focusing on education, courtship, or outlook. Many of Candace Bailey's subjects fit this youthful demographic, and in Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer, she outlines the role of music in the lives of white southern women, especially wealthy ones. Unlike most scholars approaching the subject of southern women, Bailey is a musicologist. Thus she is particularly well suited to evaluate the different genres and levels of difficulty in the music that nine­teenth-century women played and produced.

Bailey builds on earlier work on female education to argue convincingly that parents placed a great deal of importance on music. At most female academies, music was considered an extra and required a hefty additional charge. Bailey agrees with other scholars that music tuition was a marker of class status, but she also examines the meaning of musical accomplishment to the performer. She points out that elders' admonitions about practice and perfecting one's playing or singing never referred to the enjoyment that these skills might bring to the young woman herself—instead, they stressed how she might entertain and please others. Bailey, who emphasizes the patriarchal aspects of antebel­lum southern society, believes women had few weapons against the demands placed on them.

Perhaps the most innovative part of Music and the Southern Belle focuses on how accomplishments in playing and singing might best be demonstrated. Not surprisingly, elite parents did not want their daughters to perform profes­sionally, and their desire for modest daughters meant that they wished young women to play or sing sweetly rather than brilliantly. Young women were meant to ornament the parlor, and their music was chosen accordingly.

 Bailey also investigates the teaching and writing of music in the South. She finds few southern-born women among the teachers, who generally came from non-elite backgrounds. Antebellum southern women who published music typically did so using their initials or pseudonyms and tended to compose the kinds of sentimental, often simple, pieces popular among amateurs.

During the Civil War, white southern women turned to composing mar­tial music such as patriotic marches, usually under their own names. Bailey argues that these women, in keeping with their upbringing, saw com­position as a chance to be "useful." Yet women's increased visibility, as they signed their musical compositions and dedicated them to local heroes,suggests that something more than usefulness was on their minds. Bailey asserts, "Through the publication of musical works, these women had become useful to the Confederate States of America, but they had crossed a line that would eventually contribute to significant shifts of their self-perception and their role in southern society" (p. 181). Indeed, some may assert that it would appear more logical that such shifts of self-perception preceded rather than followed women's willingness to publicly claim their creations. Bailey has combined her knowledge of music and southern society in this insightful exploration of music and gender in the South." --JANE TURNER CENSER

"Music weaved its way through the coming-of-age stories of young women in the antebellum South. Daughters-at-home devoted hefty amounts of time to musical instruction, and provided gentle entertainment for family and friends. They danced to music at balls, sang in church, attended concerts and performances, and a brave few even ventured into the world of composition. Candace Bailey's book, Music and the Southern Belle, however, is the first study to situ­ate music within southern women's culture. Using sheet music (to determine what was played), diaries, and correspondence (to provide the context in which young women performed), and novels and magazines (to examine how society regarded musical performance) from the antebellum period through the Civil War, Bailey argues that the way in which music enabled southern belles to be useful changed substantially between 1835 and 1865.

Bailey's study, in large part, concentrates on the musical pursuits and accomplishments of young women in the antebellum South. Proficiency in music, she contends, signified a woman's suitability for marriage and motherhood, confirmed the status and gentility of her family, and provided her with the opportunity to "exalt and adorn" daily life, both as a parlour performer and as a teacher to her younger siblings (p. 24). In the antebellum South, more people taught music than any other subject, and parents placed a premium on instruction in piano and singing. Despite all this vigorous training, Bailey notes that young women used their skills only to furnish family and friends with sweet parlour performances that were governed by propriety, not professionalism. Some young women, however, developed more sophisticated musical repertoires, exposing tensions between the fe­male culture of resignation and the adolescent culture of resistance. Along with the indecorous exhibition of musical talent, composition was also branded a public activity; it was not taught at schools or encouraged by parents, and most of the seventy works produced by southern women in the antebellum period were published anony­mously.

The Civil War changed all that, as southern women abandoned their polkas and sentimental songs in favour of musical support for the Confederacy. The desire to be useful and to contribute to the cause in a meaningful ways, Bailey asserts, transformed young ladies into patriots. Many moved from the parlour to the stage, contrib­uting their skills to fundraising performances. Others penned and published wartime compositions under their own names, a practice that, Bailey notes, cannot be frilly attributed to patriotic fervour but rather to a desire to break free of the antebellum strictures governing both southern femininity and musical expression. These women had become useful to the Confederacy, she writes, "but they had crossed a line that would eventually contribute to significant shifts of their self-perception and their role in southern society" (p. 181).

“Candace Bailey carefully explores a previously neglected aspect of elite young women’s culture in the American South and convincingly argues that studying, appreciating, performing, and composing vocal and instrumental music both reinforced prescriptions of southern womanhood and offered southern women an effective means of resistance.”—Anya Jabour, author of Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

“Bailey combines wide-reaching archival work with sensitive cultural analysis that is at home in both feminist musicology and recent work in American Studies, uncovering untold riches of female music-making in a region where women’s musical voices have been drowned out by the sounds of the Civil War and its consequences.”—Annegret Fauser, author of Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair

"Music weaved its way through the coming-of-age stories of young women in the antebellum South. Daughters-at-home devoted hefty amounts of time to musical instruction, and provided gentle entertainment for family and friends. They danced to music at balls, sang in church, attended concerts and performances, and a brave few even ventured into the world of composition. Candace Bailey's book, Music and the Southern Belle, however, is the first study to situ­ate music within southern women's culture. Using sheet music (to determine what was played), diaries, and correspondence (to provide the context in which young women performed), and novels and magazines (to examine how society regarded musical performance) from the antebellum period through the Civil War, Bailey argues that the way in which music enabled southern belles to be useful changed substantially between 1835 and 1865.

Bailey's study, in large part, concentrates on the musical pursuits and accomplishments of young women in the antebellum South. Proficiency in music, she contends, signified a woman's suitability for marriage and motherhood, confirmed the status and gentility of her family, and provided her with the opportunity to "exalt and adorn" daily life, both as a parlour performer and as a teacher to her younger siblings (p. 24). In the antebellum South, more people taught music than any other subject, and parents placed a premium on instruction in piano and singing. Despite all this vigorous training, Bailey notes that young women used their skills only to furnish family and friends with sweet parlour performances that were governed by propriety, not professionalism. Some young women, however, developed more sophisticated musical repertoires, exposing tensions between the fe­male culture of resignation and the adolescent culture of resistance. Along with the indecorous exhibition of musical talent, composition was also branded a public activity; it was not taught at schools or encouraged by parents, and most of the seventy works produced by southern women in the antebellum period were published anony­mously.

The Civil War changed all that, as southern women abandoned their polkas and sentimental songs in favour of musical support for the Confederacy. The desire to be useful and to contribute to the cause in a meaningful ways, Bailey asserts, transformed young ladies into patriots. Many moved from the parlour to the stage, contrib­uting their skills to fundraising performances. Others penned and published wartime compositions under their own names, a practice that, Bailey notes, cannot be frilly attributed to patriotic fervour but rather to a desire to break free of the antebellum strictures governing both southern femininity and musical expression. These women had become useful to the Confederacy, she writes, "but they had crossed a line that would eventually contribute to significant shifts of their self-perception and their role in southern society" (p. 181).

"For several decades historians studying southern women tended to explore the worlds of plantation mistresses and other mature women, but more recently scholars have begun to examine the social and cultural lives of unmarried women, especially young women, often focusing on education, courtship, or outlook. Many of Candace Bailey's subjects fit this youthful demographic, and in Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer, she outlines the role of music in the lives of white southern women, especially wealthy ones. Unlike most scholars approaching the subject of southern women, Bailey is a musicologist. Thus she is particularly well suited to evaluate the different genres and levels of difficulty in the music that nine­teenth-century women played and produced.

Bailey builds on earlier work on female education to argue convincingly that parents placed a great deal of importance on music. At most female academies, music was considered an extra and required a hefty additional charge. Bailey agrees with other scholars that music tuition was a marker of class status, but she also examines the meaning of musical accomplishment to the performer. She points out that elders' admonitions about practice and perfecting one's playing or singing never referred to the enjoyment that these skills might bring to the young woman herself—instead, they stressed how she might entertain and please others. Bailey, who emphasizes the patriarchal aspects of antebel­lum southern society, believes women had few weapons against the demands placed on them.

Perhaps the most innovative part of Music and the Southern Belle focuses on how accomplishments in playing and singing might best be demonstrated. Not surprisingly, elite parents did not want their daughters to perform profes­sionally, and their desire for modest daughters meant that they wished young women to play or sing sweetly rather than brilliantly. Young women were meant to ornament the parlor, and their music was chosen accordingly.

 Bailey also investigates the teaching and writing of music in the South. She finds few southern-born women among the teachers, who generally came from non-elite backgrounds. Antebellum southern women who published music typically did so using their initials or pseudonyms and tended to compose the kinds of sentimental, often simple, pieces popular among amateurs.

During the Civil War, white southern women turned to composing mar­tial music such as patriotic marches, usually under their own names. Bailey argues that these women, in keeping with their upbringing, saw com­position as a chance to be "useful." Yet women's increased visibility, as they signed their musical compositions and dedicated them to local heroes, suggests that something more than usefulness was on their minds. Bailey asserts, "Through the publication of musical works, these women had become useful to the Confederate States of America, but they had crossed a line that would eventually contribute to significant shifts of their self-perception and their role in southern society" (p. 181). Indeed, some may assert that it would appear more logical that such shifts of self-perception preceded rather than followed women's willingness to publicly claim their creations. Bailey has combined her knowledge of music and southern society in this insightful exploration of music and gender in the South." --JANE TURNER CENSER