"Up Against the World Like it Is"

This dissertation examines the conflicted representational strategies of documentarians working in the South from 1925 through 1965 who combined elements of realism and romanticism in their work to create a new mythic image of the region. Throughout the twentieth century, documentary makers turned their eyes and recording technologies on the rural and small town South, producing a flood of documentary work in every medium from photographs of worn out farms, tenant houses, and country people, detailed examinations of Appalachian culture, to recordings and transcriptions of banjo and fiddle tunes, blues songs, and field hollers, to oral histories of ex-slaves and poor migrants, and films of old-time musicians and new civil rights activists. My project explores the work of sociologist Howard Odum, folklorists John Lomax and Ruby Pickens Tartt, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and filmmakers John Cohen and Harvey Richards. The documentary workers' political motives varied widely, from moderate liberalism to radical leftism, but they shared a desire to understand the region, to pierce through the old romantic stereotypes of conservative white Southerners to the real South, to the common folk and their poverty and their beauty. Their work, in turn, created a new romance, a new image of the region outside of time, the South as a reservoir of premodern authenticity. Documentary expression, I argue, as much as any other form of artistic and cultural representation during the twentieth century, created an enduring and powerful new mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century.