Yellow Rose Of Texas: A Song History

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"The Yellow Rose of Texas" came out of the blackface minstrel tradition. Its earliest known printed lyrics appeared in 1853 in Christy's Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a Philadelphia songbook issued under the name of minstrel leader Edwin P. Christy, and in 1858 the New York firm of Firth, Pond & Company published it as sheet music whose cover says it was composed and arranged for one Charles H. Brown by "J.K."[1] Who J.K. was is still uncertain, though in 2011 a Yale archivist turned up material pointing to John Kelly, a well-known minstrel banjo player and composer.[1] The early words are sung in the voice of a Black man longing to return to his sweetheart, and "yellow" was a racial term for a woman of mixed race, not a flower color.[1]

Chromolithograph of a spray of yellow single roses with leaves and buds on a cream ground

Annie C. Nowell, Yellow Scotch Roses, chromolithograph, L. Prang & Co., Boston, [1890]. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A flower print; it is not connected to the song.

The song spread during the Civil War, when, according to one historian, Texas troops serving in Virginia made it popular; Confederate veterans later published an anecdote of a soldier singing altered words to it, in General Hood's presence, about Hood's 1864 retreat in Tennessee.[1] The tune also passed into Southern fiddling.[2] Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters, with Ben Jarrell on fiddle, recorded it for Gennett in 1927, and the New Lost City Ramblers (1964), the Red Clay Ramblers (1975) and Tommy Jarrell (1976) all put it on record later.[2] Gene Autry and Jimmie Long revived it as a cowboy song with revised lyrics in 1933, and in 1955 Mitch Miller's orchestral version, with the racial language removed, became a Number 1 hit that sold more than a million copies.[1] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a collection of popular tunes from the dulcimer jamming tradition.[3]

A popular legend links the song to Emily D. West, a free Black woman from New Haven, Connecticut, who had come to Texas in 1835 as a contracted housekeeper for James Morgan. Mexican troops seized her in April 1836, and she was taken along with Santa Anna's army; a secondhand story recorded in 1842 claimed her presence in his camp helped the Texans win at San Jacinto.[4] Twentieth-century writers embroidered that tale and tied it to the song, but the Handbook of Texas treats the connection as unfounded: no version of the lyrics naming Emily or Morgan's Point has ever come to light, and the link now survives as modern Texas lore.[1][4] As historian Margaret S. Henson put it, if West was in Santa Anna's tent, "it was not by choice."[4]

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Sources

  1. Handbook of Texas Online (Texas State Historical Association): "Yellow Rose of Texas," by Jeff Dunn and James Lutzweiler.
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Yellow Rose of Texas".
  3. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".
  4. Handbook of Texas Online (Texas State Historical Association): "West, Emily D.," by Margaret S. Henson.