Book Review

Music and the Making of a New South. By Gavin James Campbell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8078-2486-7 (cloth); 0-8078-5517-0 (pbk.). Pp. 240. $55.00 (cloth), $19.95 (pbk.)

The post-Reconstruction South emerged from the smoldering ashes of military defeat, struggling to rebuild the region and return its cities to their antebellum grandeur. As southern cities began to draw new industries to the area, especially banking and manufacturing, metropolises such as Atlanta also attracted an influx of rural-dwellers from nearby farming communities who sought the economic and social opportunities promised by the New South. These new residents encountered a deeply entrenched elite that was unsympathetic to outsiders, thus spawning numerous socioeconomic, racial, and cultural conflicts that came to characterize urban living not only in the South, but also across the nation. Gavin James Campbell's Music and the Making of a New South explores how these tensions were manifested in the musical culture of New South Atlanta, demonstrating that the arts served both to mirror the social structures of the growing city and to make scathing commentaries of an increasingly insecure social and economic white elite.