Dixie: A Song History

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"Dixie" came out of blackface minstrelsy, a form of stage entertainment that mocked African Americans and that one historian counts as America's earliest original style of popular music.^[1] It is credited to Daniel Decatur Emmett, an Ohio-born minstrel performer and musician, who wrote it in 1859 as a "walk-around," the number that closed a minstrel show, for Bryant's Minstrels in New York.^[2][3] Sources differ on the date of the first performance: a Bryant's playbill is reported to list it on April 4, 1859, while Britannica places the premiere probably in late fall of that year.^[4][3] Firth, Pond & Co. of New York published it in 1860 as "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land," with the sheet music noting that it was written expressly for Bryant's Minstrels.^[5] Emmett's authorship has been questioned. In Way Up North in Dixie, Howard and Judith Rose Sacks examine the claim that the Snowdens, an African American family of musicians and farmers in rural Knox County, Ohio, taught the song to Emmett, and they also report the possibility that it grew out of musical exchange between the Snowdens and Emmett.^[6][4] The question is still debated; one Knox County history columnist has suggested that, as with many folk tunes of the period, the Snowdens were likely among several hands that shaped it from older musical phrases.^[7]

The song was being performed in New Orleans theaters in 1860, on the eve of secession, and it went on to serve as the Confederacy's unofficial anthem and a popular marching song for Confederate troops.^[1][3] It was played at the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 1861.^[4][8] Abraham Lincoln is nonetheless said to have liked it.^[4] On April 10, 1865, shortly after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, he asked a band serenading the White House to play it, remarking that "I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it."^[9][10]

After the war, "Dixie" became bound up with Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy, and in the twentieth century it figured in the music for The Birth of a Nation, became associated with the segregationist Dixiecrat movement of the 1940s, and was taken up by white opponents of school integration in 1950s Arkansas.^[8][11] It has drawn objections as a reminder of the Confederacy, slavery and racial discrimination: at the University of Richmond, which had played it at sporting events and ceremonies, student government pushed in 1971 to remove it, and the University of Mississippi's athletics department stopped playing it in 2016.^[11][12] The melody also passed into the old-time fiddle repertoire, recorded by fiddlers such as Uncle Am Stuart in 1924 and Doc Roberts in 1925.^[4] Mountain dulcimer players can find it in songbooks such as Larry Conger's A Treasury of Civil War Songs and Mark Nelson's Favorite Old-Time American Songs for Dulcimer from Mel Bay.^[13][14]

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Sources

1. We're History (Christian McWhirter): "Whistling Dixie".
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Daniel Decatur Emmett".
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Dixie".
4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Dixie".
5. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land".
6. University of Illinois Press (BiblioVault): "Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem".
7. Knox Pages: "Snowden Family historical marker, to be dedicated Aug. 18, has deep Knox County roots".
8. NPR (via Northwest Public Broadcasting): "The Anthemic Allure of 'Dixie,' An Enduring Confederate Monument".
9. History.com: "What Lincoln Said in His Final Speech".
10. The Lehrman Institute, Abraham Lincoln's Classroom: "Abraham Lincoln and Music".
11. University of Richmond Race & Racism Project: "Slave Auction Writings & The Dixie Controversy".
12. Mississippi Today: "For Ole Miss sports, 'Dixie' is dead".
13. The Dulcimer Shoppe (McSpadden): "A Treasury of Civil War Songs by Larry Conger".
14. Mel Bay Publications: "Favorite Old-Time American Songs for Dulcimer".