Unbinding Gentility

"An important contribution to the field of American music history. This well-written and meticulously researched volume breaks new ground in the understanding of the role that music played in shaping the lives and social positions of Southern women across race and class boundaries." --Music References Services Quarterly
"Bailey's work offers valuable new insight into the relationship between performance, music, and society during a pivotal period in US history. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a meticulously detailed study that does much to deepen, complicate, and ultimately expand our understanding of women's musical lives in the nineteenth-century South." --Women and Music
"Candace Bailey has written an impressive book that achieves its stated aim to challenge assumptions about music-making by women in the nineteenth-century United States. . . . Unbinding Gentility is a model of creative archival archaeology. . . . This deeply researched, gracefully written, and deftly organized book deserves the widest possible readership." --Music and Letters
"Unbinding Gentility dismantles facile stereotypes about women's music making in the nineteenth century in order to explore the complex intersections of women's musical practices and social class, race, and region. Women whose experiences have been silenced or caricatured come to life in this richly researched and substantial history of the US South. Bailey reveals how gentility was no predictor of social or economic status, that accomplishment was not solely the domain of white elite women, and that there is much we still need to learn from the material culture of women's musical lives."--Glenda Goodman, author of Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic