Music Making History: Musical Dramatizations of Antebellum US History, 1959?2025

Abstract

This dissertation explores how musicians and their collaborators in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries employed music to shape understandings about the nation’s early history. It details four dramatic, musical works that present histories from the antebellum period of US history (1815–1861). The four case studies in this dissertation reveal the opportunities and limitations of expression in white-dominated cultural spaces amidst changing attitudes towards race and gender in the last 75 years. I argue that music is a key component in forging and reinforcing a popular historiography of the US-American past. This dissertation looks expansively across many genres and beyond works about the antebellum South to draw connections between the themes of slavery, freedom, agrarianism, imperialism, and modernity in US-American historical memory.

The first case study profiles "The Stephen Foster Story"(1959), an outdoor musical play performed annually in Bardstown, Kentucky and a keystone of the heritage tourism industry in the state. Drawing on archived scripts, scores, and drafts and charting edits to the play in its first fifteen years, I argue that playwright Paul Green and composer Isaac Van Grove created a romanticized “Lost Cause” narrative by rooting their depictions of real people and events in stereotypes of plantation homes and happy slaves from the eponymous songwriter’s parlor and blackface minstrel songs, mythical accounts of Foster’s life, and other media like "Show Boat" and "Gone with the Wind."

The second case study analyzes "Pacific Overtures" (1976), a Broadway musical about Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition to force Japanese trade with the United States. This chapter contextualizes this production and its reception within discourses about gendered Orientalism in US media. It argues that director Harold Prince, playwright John Weidman, and composer Stephen Sondheim manipulated the conventions of post-WWII musical theatre such as The King and I to criticize US imperialism after the Vietnam War and amidst the US Bicentennial celebrations.

The third case study compares two works—both titled "Amistad"—the 1997 film by director Steven Spielberg scored by John Williams and the 1997 opera by composer Anthony Davis and librettist Thulani Davis. Both recount an 1839 slave mutiny and subsequent US court cases. The conventions of Hollywood film as realized by a predominately white creative team place the Amistad history within hegemonic narratives of US political identity. In contrast, the Davises’ opera uses a syncretic musical style and characters from West African folklore to speak to the influence of the African diaspora on American culture and better centers American freedmen’s agency in their own liberation.

The final case study revisits "The Stephen Foster Story" from a contemporary vantage point (2016–2023) to analyze changes made to the drama amidst the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This chapter combines my observations of changes to the drama’s plot, songs, characters, and costumes during this period with interviews with cast and community members about the show and the meaning of the history it represents.

Because powerful people use popular myths of the US-American past to reshape the present, it is important to showcase that “history” is a process and an ongoing debate, not an immutable truth. Music, given its emotional power, can have a profound effect in works about history. Attending to music’s rhetoric makes historians, artists, and the public better interpreters of history in creative media.