In the recent dust-up over country singer Brad Paisley’s song “Accidental Racist,” most of the attention has fallen on the song’s description of a Confederate flag on a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. The song’s reference to “Dixieland” has drawn far less comment and ire.
Why is that? After all, Paisley’s protagonist — “just a white man comin’ to you from the Southland/Tryin’ to understand what it’s like not to be” — seems to think that the flag and the nickname are of a piece, simple signs of Southern pride and little more. But the song’s emphatic, perhaps ironic, use of “Dixie” raises a number of questions about what is at stake in this charismatic and controversial name.
Put simply, “Dixie” is a word that is widely read and little understood. The name evokes strong associations and engenders even stronger feelings, despite the fact that there is little agreement on what, exactly, it means. People often use “Dixie” transparently, as if it were a mere synonym for the South. Such usage whitewashes the word’s complicated origins and obscures the South’s complex cultural histories.
While there is no definitive etymological source for the word, scholars trace its use as a nickname for the South to the minstrel song “Dixie”: “I wish I was in the land of cotton/Old times there are not forgotten…” In the weeks following its first performance on Broadway in 1859, “Dixie,” with its problematic image of African-Americans longing for the plantation South, became a stand-in for the region as a whole.
Originally performed in blackface and published in dialect, the song was hugely popular in both the North and the South in the lead-up to the Civil War. During the war, “Dixie” became the de facto Confederate national anthem, which caused some Southern nationalists to worry the song would “impose its very name on our country.” Needless to say, those worries were well founded.
More than 150 years later, the song and its nickname continue to shape how people think about the South. Among many other things, “Dixie” functions as a shorthand for regional pride and racism; tradition and backwardness; a sense of place, and a sense of outrage. “Dixie” has been used both by and against Southerners, with varying degrees of affection and disgust, for generations.
In the 21st century, the word helps to sell everything from beer to botanicals, from baby strollers to mortuary services. Even products that have an ambiguous or vexed relationship to the South — for instance, Dixie Cups, or the Dixie Chicks — become Southern by association.
We cannot assume that “Dixie” names the same thing in the same way every time it is used. After all, the U.S. South has always been an exceedingly difficult region to define. Moreover, the South’s increasing diversity runs counter to the word’s strongly sectional associations.
Many contemporary Southerners want nothing to do with “Dixie” — as a nickname or a cultural identity. Nonetheless, writers, artists, and critics persist in using the word to tell about the South. Brad Paisley is far from alone. (Although he does seem particularly enamored of the word; three songs on Paisley’s new album, “Wheelhouse,” name-check “Dixie.”) As a result, we can be sure that “Dixie” won’t be forgotten anytime soon. We would do well, then, to think more carefully about the power of this promiscuous five-letter word.
Coleman Hutchison is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America.” He is currently working on a cultural biography of “Dixie.”
