I have been amazed at the heat if not light that has been generated by the posting of this squib of an article. The PC conscious writer seems taken aback by discovering that the one group that the 'right thinking, highly evolved' folks he lives around can safely be contemptuously prejudiced against are white southerners regardless of whether they are from the tidewater, the piedmont, the deep south, or the mountains. The unconscious irony of this article is what attracted me to it not as an invitation to display who was the most regionally chauvinistic.
One item that has gotten a lot more attention than it merits is the curious song "Im a Good Old Rebel' and its purported author Innes Randolph, Jr. Many consider
"Good Old Rebel" has always been something of a shell-game. It's not a southern folk song, a lament from the oral tradition. Innes Randolph, the man who wrote it, was an officer and a gentleman who served on J. E. B. Stuart's staff and became a poet after the Civil War. The writer, whoever he was, deliberately makes "the good old rebel" mispronounce words and use bad grammar. This would appear to be to poke fun at him and his political viewpoint. It appears Randolph a genteel southerner is ridiculing southern hillbilly attitudes.
One authority on music of the WBTS/CW, Charles Hamm, has this to say about this curious song and its cloudy provenance:
The text of this song is not in keeping with the rest of his work which consisted of conventional Victorian pieties respectful towards the heroes of the past (John Marshall for instance. Not a figure a fire eating secessionist would find inspirational) Born in Virginia in 1837 Randolph attended Hobart College in Geneva, New York and was a graduate of the State and National Law School in Poughkeepsie both interestingly,in heavily abolitionist eras. During the Civil War he was a topographical engineer and held the rank of major serving under Jed Hotchkiss first on Jackson and then Stuart's staffs. After the Civil War he settled at Richmond where he was worked at the Examiner while pursuing his poetry and other writing. The poetry of this period was collected and published by his son Harold Randolph after his death. It was in 1868 that Randolph moved to Baltimore and took up the pactice of law but he continued his newspaper work with the Baltimore papers and was the long time editorial page writer for the old Baltimore American. Innes Randolph died in Baltimore in 1887.
A number of mysteries surround the present song. American War Songs claims that itwas entered for copyright by A. C. Blackmar in Louisiana in 1864, yet the words were clearly written after the war. The earliest edition gives “J.R.T.” as the author, yet mosthistorians of song agree that the tune was known as “Joe Bowers” and was by R. Bishop Buckley of Buckley’s Minstrels, the text by either Adelbert Volck or Major Innes Randolph, a “cultivated Southerner of letters. ”This edition (used for the presentrecording) appears to have been published in New Orleans in 1866 and bears an ironic dedication to “the Honorable Thad. Stevens.” The first musical phrase differs from the version printed in such anthologies as Songs of the Civil War and Singing Soldiers,though the remainder of the music is almost identical.It may well be that most of these allegations are true, that the many contradictions in this story can be resolved. The tune may have been known in oral tradition before the Civil War: many of its melodic turns, and its use of a “gapped” or incomplete scale (the fourth note is absent, and the seventh is barely touched on), are characteristic of much Scotch-Irish traditional music. Buckley may have appropriated the tune, perhaps polishing it to make it conform more nearly to the tastes of minstrel-show audiences; a certain number of minstrel songs, including “Old Dan Tucker” and “De Boatman’s Dance,” show similar evidence of having been adapted from oral tradition tunes. Volck, or Innes, or both may have fitted a new topical text to a tune they knew either from folk tradition or the minstrel repertory. This text was probably too extreme to be widely circulated in a printed version,even in the postwar South, and its chief popularity was as a song passed on by earthrough several generations. It seems not to have appeared in print between the one edition in 1866 and the several versions taken down from oral tradition in the middle of the present century, and the differences between the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryversions are not unusual for a song that has bounced back and forth between written and oral versions. On this album it is sung in an unaccompanied version.Whatever the case, the song in all its versions is yet another demonstration of the intensity of feeling aroused by the war.
http://www.newworldrecords.org/linernotes/80202.pdf
In passing , Hamm also remarks on the core of much of the passion that fueled Southern fervor in the conflict:
Although slavery was a crucial issue in the war, large areas of
the South did not depend on slavery, and the majority of Rebel soldiers were from nonslaveholding families; but the entire region had a fierce conviction that states, towns, and individuals—not the federal government —should determine how their lives were to be led. This attitude was expressed with clarity and conviction in a letter that Charles C. Jones, Jr., a Georgian and an officer in the Confederate Army,wrote to his father early in the war:
"Surely we are passing through harsh times, and are beset with perils which humanity in its worst phases has not encountered for centuries. The Age of Gold has yielded to the Age of Iron; and the North furnishes an example of refined barbarity, moral degeneracy, religious impiety, soulless honor, and absolute degradation almost beyond belief. Omnia vestigia retrorsum [“all footsteps turn back upon themselves”]....We can only make a proper use of those means which He has placed in our power, and with a firm reliance on the justice of our cause, and with earnest supplication of His aid who saves not by many nor by few, offer every resistance to the inroads of this inhuman enemy, and illustrate every virtue which pertains to a brave, God-fearing people engaged in an awful struggle, against wonderful odds, for personal, civil, and religious freedom."
The writer was not some provincial fanatic but rather a successful lawyer, historian, and archaeologist who held degrees from Princeton and the Harvard Law School.
In closing, as to songs and poetry of this period I personally prefer the following from the pen of another southern poet and novelist who also served in Stuart's cavalry, John Esten Cooke. Cooke lived near many of the scenes of the war he had participated and the most vivid recollections of the war were constantly awakened by normal travel and business activities. Due to this Cooke wrote the following:
THE BAND IN THE PINES
by John Esten Cooke
(1829-1867)
Oh, band in the pine-wood, cease!
Cease with your splendid call;
The living are brave and noble,
But the dead were bravest of all!
They throng to the martial summons,
To the loud triumphant strain;
And the dear, bright eyes of long dead friends
Come to the heart again.
They come with the ringing bugle,
And the deep drum's mellow roar,
Till the soul is faint with longing
For the hands we clasp no more.
Oh, band in the pine-wood, cease,
Or the heart will melt in tears,
For the gallant eyes and the smiling lips
And the voices of old years.
For more information on Innes Randolph see:
Edwin Anderson Alderman & Joel Chandler Harris (eds.), Library of Southern Literature 349 (New Orleans: Martin & Hoyt Co., 1910) (1907) (Vol. 15, Biographical Dictionary of Authors, Lucian Lamar Knight ed.)]
Curtis Carroll Davis, "James Innes Randolph, Jr. (1837-1887)," in Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora & Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (eds.), Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary 368-369 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979)]