Dr. Cox's paper focuses on popular music about the American South, tracing its development from the minstrel tunes of Stephen Foster and Daniel Decatur Emmett to the "coon songs" of the late nineteenth-century, and finally, the "back-to-Dixie" songs of Tin Pan Alley. Cox shows how popular music, over several decades, helped perpetuate a nostalgic image of the South as a pre-industrial American paradise where life was easy and less hectic than the urban North, and African Americans like the beloved "mammy" were idealized as happy servants.