We sometimes hear Confederate Heritage groups claim that moving a monument or taking down a Confederate Battle Flag amounts to “changing history.” What they don’t often admit is that these same heitage groups have sometimes removed monuments and changed the names of parks when it has suited their purposes. What are we to think of one of the bedrock Confederate Heritage groups trying to change that most sacred Confederate artifact, Dixie, the Confederate National Anthem.
In Caroline Janney’s book Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause, the historian reports on just such an effort.
At the beginning of the 20th Century the Confederate Southern Memorial Association (CSMA) called for changing the words to the song Dixie! The CSMA was a national organization created by the network of Ladies Memorial Associations which had been burying the Confederate dead and caring for their graves since 1865. Here is what Janney says:
Perhaps most surprising, at first glance, was its effort to change the words to the South’s unofficial anthem, “Dixie.” When the Montgomery Advertiser asked, “What is the matter with the old words to Dixie?” the women of the association offered a sharp reply. “The words are unworthy of the air” because they had been composed for a “negro minstrel performance.” While the tune became popular during the war, the memorial women contended that “the words are nothing but doggerel and negro dialect. Some do not even rhyme.” Since the CSMA wanted schoolchildren to sing the song, they thought it only fitting that the words be changed to something more solemn that reflected the seriousness of the war rather than the light-hearted nature of a minstrel show. Venerating Confederate soldiers might be their mantra, but CSMA women clearly understood their power to shape young white southern minds regarding proper race relations in the early twentieth century.
Source: Janney, Caroline E.. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Civil War America) (pp. 182-183). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
A friend, John Hartwell, found a report on this plan from the New Orleans Times-Picayune of May 17, 1903:
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