> >Stats provided by Michael says that the most significant change is not
> >out-migration from cities to suburbs but depopulation of rural areas and/or
> >what used to be rural areas developping into suburbs.
> >
>
>
> I thought about that too, but not necessarily. The pricing of suburban and
> urban residences suggests a different pattern: rural migrants moving to the
> cities where housing costs are lower than in the suburbs. Manhattan,
> Boston or San Francisco might be excpetions, but that ceratinly holds for
> other cities.
I forget whether I posted "Disaster in the Mannington Mine" to this list, but in any case, a second song I posted, "Jenny's Gone Away" [from Appalachia, that is], is pertinent to this suggestion by Wojtek:
Jenny's gone away, Jenny's gone to Ohio
Jenny's gone away
.................................
Jenny's hill got stripped away, Jenny's gone away
Strip mine operators had their say and now she's gone away
Jenny's gone away, Jenny's gone to Uptown town,
Jenny's gone away.
.................................
Jenny didn't want to go away, Jenny's gone away
The company took her palce to stay and Jenny's gone away
Jenny's gone away, Jenny's gone to Ohio
Jenny's gone away.
I don't know if similar songs "celebrate" the huge black migration in the 1960s,70s from rural Mississippi to Chicago or not, but they should exist. And the midwest is honeycombed by deserted small villages (which were still there in the 1940s, but began disappearing in the 1950s. (That process of course had started much earlier with the destruction of the interurban routes and regular passenger rail service between towns in the 1920s.)
Carrol