Friday, February 17, 2017

Songs of Place: Blues for Dixie

There's something about the South. There must be, with so many songs having been written about it over the years. There are occasional songs about Maine, say, or Vermont, even parts of Massachusetts, but about the entire region called New England, not so much. What does it take for a region to be frequently glorified in song? It takes many people longing to go back, which means of course that many people would have had to have left it. In other words, it takes economic dislocation, with associated mass exodus. Then you get songs like Blues for Dixie, written by Cindy Walker.


So Cindy Walker was a prolific songwriter. She wrote Flying South to Dixie on the same theme: where I am ain't where I ant to be.


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