(Photo: Percival Everett)

You can read the complete text online here.

You can listen to a live reading here.

This is the song, “Dixie,” that Daniel sings in the story. It was written in 1859, and was adopted, with additional lyrics, as the national anthem of the Confederacy.

However, the book Way Up North In Dixie suggests that the origins of the song are more complicated than the Confederates and their modern-day sympathizers might have imagined. You will be getting the introduction to Way Up North as a handout. You can read a review of the book here.

As Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops (and the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur “Genius” Grant) notes, it’s complicated.

Here, Rhiannon Giddens talks about the history of the banjo, which was transplanted from West Africa to the Caribbean to the southern U.S.

Giddens playing an original song with banjo, “Julie,” based on the memoir of a nineteenth-century slave.

Percival Everett talks about the myth of race: