This essay originated as a paper delivered at the Dvořák Sesquicentennial Conference and Festival held in New Orleans on 14–20 February 1991. Most of the participants were historical musicologists from the United States and what was then Czechoslovakia. The notion that Dvořák drew on American “folk” material in several of his extended pieces written in America and had urged American composers to do the same, first put forward by journalists in the last decade of the nineteenth century, is still widely accepted, though the nature and source of this “folk” material and the meaning of the term “folk” at that time are not questioned. As a result, Dvořák's knowledge of and admiration for the plantation songs of Stephen Foster and other American songwriters has been overlooked, as has the complex interaction at the turn of the century among several genres – classical music, “national song,” popular music – and the ideology embedded in these genres and their labels.

Nationalism in music is defined by The New Harvard Dictionary of Music as: