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NA Confidential: Civil War songs: "I'm a Good Old Rebel," but ...

During the mid-1970’s, I spent way too much time pillaging the LP collection at the NA-FC Public Library, borrowing albums and committing them to cassette tape. These archival finds delightfully augmented my nascent musical tastes with a sheer breadth of material that would have been fiscally impossible for a high school student to manage on the open market. The Bicentennial year came in 1976, and at some point afterward, probably as late as 1978, I noticed the arrival of numerous attractively packaged LPs at the library: A 100-album set called The Recorded Anthology of American Music , produced by New World Records . The idea, as originally funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, was (and is) to trace the history of America through its music. As you can see by following the New World Records link, the effort continues more than three decades later. As a side note, an almost completely intact, second set of the Anthology was placed at WNAS, New Albany High School’s radio station; I saw it there while substituting teaching during the early 1980’s. Seeing as the vast bulk of the original albums present classical works and formal composition, these had not been touched by discerning high school students. Only a handful of LPs were missing. Whether at the library or the high school, this set of albums was a mother lode for me. (New World Records 80202), with liner notes by Charles Hamm. It’s always been my favorite of them all. I've chosen just one of the songs to examine today: "I'm a Good Old Rebel," which to my mind illustrates the ultimate success of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy -- which was still playing out on the ground when these liner notes were written, about to come to fruition under Ronald Reagan during the 1980's. Many Southerners refused to be “reconstructed.” Some went west after the war, a few went abroad, and many of those who stayed in the South nursed a deep hatred for the North for the remainder of their lives while outwardly conforming to the realities of postwar life. These intense feelings brought about a political climate that unified the South against the Republican Party for almost a century. Rarely has hatred been so directly and convincingly expressed as in these lyrics. A number of mysteries surround the present song. American War Songs claims that it was entered for copyright by A. C. Blackmar in Louisiana in 1864, yet the words were clearly written after the war.

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Annotated cases, American and English, containing the important cases selected from the current American, Canadian, and English reports, thoroughly annotated