“Remember Those Beautiful Songs”: Preserving Antebellum Cultural Practices through Music Collection during the Civil War

Abstract

Between 1861 and 1865, Nora Gardner, a young woman from northwestern Tennessee, collected music that survives today in two binder’s volumes, now housed in the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University.1 These volumes contain music that encapsulates many aspects of a young southern woman’s life in the midnineteenth century, and in that regard they mirror thousands of other collections that survive from this period. Nora’s assemblage, however, differs from others because she carefully notated many places, names, and dates in them, thereby deliberately preserving the culture signified by these materials. Comments written in these two volumes illuminate aspects of Nora’s life during this period: school, divided loyalties during the Civil War, courtship, and friendship. More than evidence of popular music preferences, they typify the culture associated with her class and evince an almost desperate attempt to maintain antebellum constructions of femininity even as war disrupted practically everything she had been taught about her role and place in southern society. In an examination of over fifteen hundred binder’s volumes, I have yet to encounter such conscientious notation of names, places, and dates as I have seen in Nora’s volumes. They remind us that the path of war traversed Tennessee several times, impacting the lives of not only soldiers