Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with dixieland

By the waters of Cape Cod I sat and wept when I remembered Hotlanta . . .

MasonDixon — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:06:46 -0800

What are the best websites about the American South and Southern Culture? Help me remember what I have left and to keep abreast of the cultural happenings in my homeland while I sojourn amongst the Yankees. I'm looking for things like the Southern Foodways Alliance that celebrates Southern food and The Oxford Americana Southern magazine of writing.

Southern Lit, Sociologically oriented sites, Websites on Southern Music, a great history website or well written, Southern focused blogs are what I am looking for.

If music be the food of love, post on...

HeroZero — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:09:12 -0800

HighSchoolTwelfthNightProductionFilter: Help me set some Shakespearean songs to 1920's dixieland jazz melodies. Challenging, esoteric topic for the hive mind:

My high school students are performing Twelfth Night soon. They chose to set the play in a sort of mythical "Mardi Gras" setting. Feste sings a couple of songs, and I'm trying to find some period music for the actor to sing along with. Mostly this has involved me muttering along to my Louis Armstrong tracks in iTunes. Does anyone have any advice on how else do this?

Here are the two songs Feste will sing:

1st song:
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low:
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

2nd Song

Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!

Thanks!

What does the phrase "Look Away" mean in the chorus of the song "Dixie".

jjjjjjjijjjjjjj — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:12:55 -0800

In the (traditional Southern U.S.) song "Dixie", what is meant by the lyric "Look away" from the chorus "Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land." O, I wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie Land.

I'm unfamiliar with use of "look away" in this context, and I imagine that it's an idiomatic usage that, well... meant something in the mid-19th century. What was it? Thanks.