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Binder's Volumes as Musical Commonplace Books: The Transmission of Cultural Codes in the Antebellum South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

CANDACE BAILEY
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Abstract

Binder's volumes are among the primary artifacts of antebellum women's musical culture, and they serve as more than records of popular genres, composers, and styles. They can be interpreted as a type of commonplace book compiled by young women between the ages of about ten and fifteen. This study examines the books of three young women from different social positions (Eliza Harwell of Williamsburg, VA; Mary Stedman of Fayetteville, NC; and Kate Berry of Nashville, TN) in order to understand the cultural values that they transmitted to them: they contain items that serve not only as pieces of music and means to achieve and demonstrate musical accomplishment, but also as visual aids to guide them in deportment, sentiment, and behavior. It also considers the personal notations made by the owners in each collection. These evince how one is to be viewed, how one is to present herself for the gratification of others, how one is to think or behave, how one moves within desired social circles. They demonstrate how one is to Perform—whether or not music occurs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 446 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2016 

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References

References

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Sheet Music and Broadsides Collection. Center for Popular Music. Middle Tennessee State University. Murfreesboro, TN.Google Scholar
Skinner Family Papers, 1705–1900. Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC.Google Scholar
Private collection. Hillsborough, NC.Google Scholar
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Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeanice. “Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection, and Display at Tatton Park.” Music & Letters 91, no. 4 (2010): 513–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Mary Thomas. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Davis, Ronald L. A History of Music in American Life: The Formative Years, 1620–1855. Vol. 1. Malabar, FL: Robert Krieger, 1980.Google Scholar
Ellis, Katharine. “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, nos. 2–3 (1997): 353–85.Google Scholar
Fetterley, Judith. Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
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Grier, Katherine C. Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.Google Scholar
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Hoffman, William S. Andrew Jackson and North Carolina Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Hoffman, William S.. “The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835 : A Study in Jacksonian Democracy.” North Carolina Historical Review 46 (1969): 335–64.Google Scholar
Hughes, Richard L. “Minstrel Music: The Sounds and Images of Race in Antebellum America.” The History Teacher 40, no. 1 (2006): 27–43.Google Scholar
Hünten, Franz. Celebrated Instructions for the Piano Forte. Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1864. https://archive.org/stream/23223356.4056.emory.edu/23223356_4056#page/n15/mode/2up.Google Scholar
Jumonville, Florence M. “ Set to Music: The Engravers, Artists, and Lithographers of New Orleans Sheet Music.” In The Cultivation of Artists in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Barnhill, Georgia Brady, Korzenik, Diana, and Sloat, Caroline F., 103–8. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1997. http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44574413.pdf.Google Scholar
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Kerrison, Catherine. “The Novel as Teacher: Learning to be Female in the Early American South.” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 513–48.Google Scholar
Koza, Julia Eklund. “Music and the Feminine Sphere: Images of Women as Musicians in ‘Godey's Lady's Book,’ 1830–1877.” Musical Quarterly 75, no. 2 (1991): 103–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koza, Julia Eklund. “Music Instruction in the Nineteenth Century: Views from ‘Godey's Lady's Book, 1830–77.” Journal of Research in Music Education 38, no. 4 (1990): 245–57.Google Scholar
Lehuu, Isabelle. “Sentimental Figures: Reading Godey's Lady's Book in Antebellum America.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Samuels, Shirley, 73–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano.” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2 (1992): 105–28.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Loesser, Arthur, Rothstein, Edward, and Barzun, Jacques. Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 2011.Google Scholar
Maillard, Mary, ed. The Belles of Williamsburg: The Courtship Correspondence of Eliza Fisk Harwood and Tristrim Lowther Skinner 1839–1849. N.p.: Independent Booksellers Association, 2015.Google Scholar
McGinely, William, Whitcomb, Jennifer A., and Zerwin, Sarah M.. “Amazing Space: Reading Life in the Literature Classroom.” In Focus on Curriculum, edited by McInerney, Dennis M. and Van Etten, Shawn, 253–72. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2005.Google Scholar
Meyer Frazier, Petra. “American Women's Roles and Domestic Music Making as Revealed in Parlor Song Collections: 1820–1870.” Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1999.Google Scholar
McGinely, William. Bound Music, Unbound Women: The Search for an Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Missoula, MT: College Music Society, 2015.Google Scholar
Minnigerode, Meade. The Fabulous Forties 1840–1850, a Presentation of Private Life. New York: Putnam, 1924.Google Scholar
Myers, Mitzi. “Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth's Telltale Tailpiece.” The Lion and the Unicorn 20, no. 2 (1996): 230–63.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pease, Jane H., and Pease, William H.. A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Ping, Nancy Regan. “Music in Antebellum Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear of North Carolina.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979.Google Scholar
Potter, Dorothy T. Food for Apollo: Cultivated Music in Antebellum Philadelphia. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Rumbley, Erica Joy. “From Piano Girl to Professional: The Changing Form of Music Instruction at the Nashville Female Academy, Ward's Seminary for Young Ladies, and the Ward-Belmont School, 1816–1920.” Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/music_etds/24/.Google Scholar
Slobin, Mark, Kimball, James W., Preston, Katherine K., Root, Deane L., and McKissick, Emily, eds. Emily's Songbook: Music in 1850s Albany. Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music 9. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2011.Google Scholar
Tatham, David. The Lure of the Striped Pig: The Illustration Popular Music in America 1820–1870. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1973.Google Scholar
Watson II, Harry Legare. “‘Bitter Combinations of the Neighborhood’: The Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976.Google Scholar
Wexler, Laura. “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th- Century America, edited by Samuels, Shirley, 9–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Willinksy, John. “Postmodern Literacy: A Primer.” Interchange 22, no. 4 (1991): 56–76.Google Scholar
Godey's Lady's Book 42 (1851).Google Scholar
Graham's Magazine 18–19 (1841), 51 (1857).Google Scholar
Harper's Magazine 3 (September 1851).Google Scholar
19th-Century American Sheet Music. Music Library. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC.Google Scholar
Sheet Music and Broadsides Collection. Center for Popular Music. Middle Tennessee State University. Murfreesboro, TN.Google Scholar
Skinner Family Papers, 1705–1900. Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC.Google Scholar
Private collection. Hillsborough, NC.Google Scholar
Bailey, Candace. “The Antebellum ‘Piano Girl’ in the American South.” Performance Practice Review 13, no. 1 (2008): 26–27. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol13/iss1/1.Google Scholar
Bailey, Candace. Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Banfield, Marie. “From Sentiment to Sentimentality: A Nineteenth-Century Lexicographical Search.” http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/459/319.Google Scholar
Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeanice. “Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection, and Display at Tatton Park.” Music & Letters 91, no. 4 (2010): 513–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Mary Thomas. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Davis, Ronald L. A History of Music in American Life: The Formative Years, 1620–1855. Vol. 1. Malabar, FL: Robert Krieger, 1980.Google Scholar
Ellis, Katharine. “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, nos. 2–3 (1997): 353–85.Google Scholar
Fetterley, Judith. Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Foster, Daniel H. “Sheet Music Iconography and Music in the History of Transatlantic Minstrelsy.” Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2009): 147–61.Google Scholar
Grier, Katherine C. Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Harris, Beth, ed. Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. London: Ashgate, 2005.Google Scholar
Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hijar, Katherine. “The Pin-Up, the Piano, and the Parlor: American Sheet Music, 1840–1860.” Imprint: the Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society 6, no. 1 (2005): 7–21.Google Scholar
Hoffman, William S. Andrew Jackson and North Carolina Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Hoffman, William S.. “The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835 : A Study in Jacksonian Democracy.” North Carolina Historical Review 46 (1969): 335–64.Google Scholar
Hughes, Richard L. “Minstrel Music: The Sounds and Images of Race in Antebellum America.” The History Teacher 40, no. 1 (2006): 27–43.Google Scholar
Hünten, Franz. Celebrated Instructions for the Piano Forte. Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1864. https://archive.org/stream/23223356.4056.emory.edu/23223356_4056#page/n15/mode/2up.Google Scholar
Jumonville, Florence M. “ Set to Music: The Engravers, Artists, and Lithographers of New Orleans Sheet Music.” In The Cultivation of Artists in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Barnhill, Georgia Brady, Korzenik, Diana, and Sloat, Caroline F., 103–8. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1997. http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44574413.pdf.Google Scholar
Kelly, Catherine E. “Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment.” In Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by Hackel, Heidi and Kelly, Catherine E., 124–43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Kerrison, Catherine. “The Novel as Teacher: Learning to be Female in the Early American South.” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 513–48.Google Scholar
Koza, Julia Eklund. “Music and the Feminine Sphere: Images of Women as Musicians in ‘Godey's Lady's Book,’ 1830–1877.” Musical Quarterly 75, no. 2 (1991): 103–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koza, Julia Eklund. “Music Instruction in the Nineteenth Century: Views from ‘Godey's Lady's Book, 1830–77.” Journal of Research in Music Education 38, no. 4 (1990): 245–57.Google Scholar
Lehuu, Isabelle. “Sentimental Figures: Reading Godey's Lady's Book in Antebellum America.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Samuels, Shirley, 73–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano.” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2 (1992): 105–28.Google Scholar
Leppert, Richard. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Loesser, Arthur, Rothstein, Edward, and Barzun, Jacques. Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 2011.Google Scholar
Maillard, Mary, ed. The Belles of Williamsburg: The Courtship Correspondence of Eliza Fisk Harwood and Tristrim Lowther Skinner 1839–1849. N.p.: Independent Booksellers Association, 2015.Google Scholar
McGinely, William, Whitcomb, Jennifer A., and Zerwin, Sarah M.. “Amazing Space: Reading Life in the Literature Classroom.” In Focus on Curriculum, edited by McInerney, Dennis M. and Van Etten, Shawn, 253–72. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2005.Google Scholar
Meyer Frazier, Petra. “American Women's Roles and Domestic Music Making as Revealed in Parlor Song Collections: 1820–1870.” Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1999.Google Scholar
McGinely, William. Bound Music, Unbound Women: The Search for an Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Missoula, MT: College Music Society, 2015.Google Scholar
Minnigerode, Meade. The Fabulous Forties 1840–1850, a Presentation of Private Life. New York: Putnam, 1924.Google Scholar
Myers, Mitzi. “Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth's Telltale Tailpiece.” The Lion and the Unicorn 20, no. 2 (1996): 230–63.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pease, Jane H., and Pease, William H.. A Family of Women: The Carolina Petigrus in Peace and War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Ping, Nancy Regan. “Music in Antebellum Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear of North Carolina.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979.Google Scholar
Potter, Dorothy T. Food for Apollo: Cultivated Music in Antebellum Philadelphia. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Rumbley, Erica Joy. “From Piano Girl to Professional: The Changing Form of Music Instruction at the Nashville Female Academy, Ward's Seminary for Young Ladies, and the Ward-Belmont School, 1816–1920.” Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/music_etds/24/.Google Scholar
Slobin, Mark, Kimball, James W., Preston, Katherine K., Root, Deane L., and McKissick, Emily, eds. Emily's Songbook: Music in 1850s Albany. Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music 9. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2011.Google Scholar
Tatham, David. The Lure of the Striped Pig: The Illustration Popular Music in America 1820–1870. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1973.Google Scholar
Watson II, Harry Legare. “‘Bitter Combinations of the Neighborhood’: The Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976.Google Scholar
Wexler, Laura. “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th- Century America, edited by Samuels, Shirley, 9–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Willinksy, John. “Postmodern Literacy: A Primer.” Interchange 22, no. 4 (1991): 56–76.Google Scholar
Godey's Lady's Book 42 (1851).Google Scholar
Graham's Magazine 18–19 (1841), 51 (1857).Google Scholar
Harper's Magazine 3 (September 1851).Google Scholar