Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930). Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films ( The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel [both 1935] and Dimples [1936]) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel , the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musicodramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara. The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.

A quest, a murder, and musical retribution through a dead body part that sings: these are the elements of the folktale known as “The Singing Bone,” a traditional narrative that appears in numerous versions in both oral and literary European traditions. For decades, this tale has drawn the special attention of folklorists because of the remarkable and indeed sensational role played in it by music: its narrative reflects a fascinating ideology of the cultural power of music as the voice of the oppressed, while its musical interludes, chilling spectral songs sung by the bone of the murder victim, invoke the potent and at times unsettling effects of musical performance. Gustav Mahler's first large-scale work, Das klagende Lied , takes up this extraordinary narrative and translates its exceptional features into poetry and musical sound in a manner that especially foregrounds and amplifies the effects of a performing presence in both textual and musical dimensions. Mahler's narrative ballad is a multivoiced text whose temporal and vocal shifts create oscillations between narrative and drama, telling and enactment, giving rise to a remarkable instability of utterance from which repeated evocations of sound and voice emerge. Its musical setting delivers a discourse that similarly exhibits explicit moments of performance, temporal suspension, and sonic dislocation in both voices and orchestra. This extreme volatility of utterance and its resultant effects of presence become the means of the work's embodiment of its own narrative content, such that, in performance, it evokes an experience of the radical sonic rupture that is the story's theme—a theme that reverberates powerfully throughout Mahler's oeuvre.