From Dixie to Rocky Top

Carrie Tipton is a musicologist who writes, teaches, and lectures about US vernacular music.

Amid yet another conference realignment saga, Tipton offers a vibrant, timely reminder of how the SEC's boisterous fight songs and rally cries remain steeped in a regional specificity comprised of far more than the pageantry, precision, and patriarchy of Southern football culture."—Courtney M. Cox, co-director of The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society "From Dixie to Rocky Top is the book about Southeastern Conference football that you never knew you needed. Carrie Tipton’s examination of the evolution of the music sung and played at football games, and which became an integral part of college culture, is eye opening history. As she demonstrates, this genre of music was not always benign. “Dixie,” for example, was both an expression of the Lost Cause and a bulwark to racial inclusivity. The book's significance is tied to the fact that Tipton takes popular music seriously. From minstrelsy to ragtime and beyond, music derived from popular culture connected people to one another and to the colleges and football teams she writes about. From Dixie to Rocky Top is also accessible and entertaining, so it surely will find an audience with the larger public, as well as a place in college classrooms."—Karen L. Cox, author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture​"Tipton has written a book that challenges accepted stories, complicates received wisdom, and situates an important repertoire within US popular culture of the last century or more."—Travis D. Stimeling, author of Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter One: “Hideous with Unearthly Noises”: Early Football Sounds and SpacesChapter Two: Songs of the South: Football Music and the Lost CauseChapter Three: Who Wrote This? Authorship and Copyright in Two Early Fight SongsChapter Four: The Song That Changed Everything and the Man Who Published It: Thornton W.   Allen and the “Washington and Lee Swing” (1910)Chapter Five: Where Are All the Ladies At?Chapter Six: Southern Fight Songs in the Jazz AgeChapter Seven: The Business of College Songs in the 1930sChapter Eight: Make It Hot: Pushing for Pep in the 1930sChapter Nine: Huey Long’s Band Plays His SongsChapter Ten: Three Postwar Fight SongsChapter Eleven: What Fades and What RemainsEpilogue: OvertimeAppendix: College Songs Published, Written, or Copyrighted by Thornton W. AllenNotesBibliographyIndex