Date of Graduation
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MA
College
College of Creative Arts
Department
School of Music
Committee Chair
Travis D Stimeling
Committee Co-Chair
William Haller
Committee Member
Evan A MacCarthy
Abstract
This study discusses the practice of music-making by middle and upper class women in the nineteenth-century American South, and the ways in which the practice was continued in the decades following the Civil War amid changing class and gender politics. The study examines two sheet music collections, one from the South and one from the North, dating from the 1880s and 1890s. An examination of the content of these collections reveals differing attitudes over changing class and gender politics and acceptable practices for music-making in the North and South. A discussion of these young women and their families tells their stories through the sheet music they left behind.
Recommended Citation
Green, Melanie J., ""The Whistling Wife": Women and Popular Song in the Postbellum American South" (2015). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 5709.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/5709