A related question: Why have songs about the South become popular all over the country, among folk musicians and commercially as well, while regional songs dealing with the North do not seem to have had the same appeal? The obvious answer is the influence of minstrelsy and vaudeville, but why were 'Southern' songs so well liked among Northerners in the first place? I think the answer goes back to nostalgia. Popular culture, expressed in song, compared the agrarian, rural South favorably to the industrial, urban North. Not that there wasn't plenty of 'rural culture' in the North, but it doesn't seem to captured the imagination of folks the way Southern civilation did (warts and all).