Dixie (song)

• 1. Introduction

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  "Dixie" began its life not in the South but on a New York stage, on the 4th of April, 1859, when Bryant's Minstrels premiered it at Mechanics' Hall as a "plantation song and dance." The walkaround became a runaway success so fast that the Bryants immediately made it their standard closing number. Within a year, the song would travel from Manhattan parlors to New Orleans theaters to Confederate encampments, and would eventually be played at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis and at Abraham Lincoln's request after the Civil War's final surrender. How does a minstrel dance tune written by an Ohio-born composer become the most contested song in American history? What does it tell us about the country that both sides of a war claimed it as their own, and that people are still arguing about it today?

• 2. The Man Who Maybe Wrote It

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  Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett published "Dixie" on the 21st of June, 1860, through Firth, Pond & Co. in New York, under the title "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land." By 1908, four years after his death, no fewer than 37 people had claimed the song as theirs. Even Emmett's own accounts of its creation contradicted one another. He said at various times that he wrote it in a few minutes, in a single night, and over a few days. An 1872 edition of the New York Clipper recounted that a minstrel company manager named Jerry Bryant had told Emmett on a Saturday night that they needed a new walkaround by Monday. According to that telling, Emmett shut himself in his New York apartment and wrote the song that Sunday evening.

  Later accounts added even more conflicting texture. In one version, Emmett described a sudden burst: "I jumped up and sat down at the table to work. In less than an hour, I had the first verse and chorus." In another, he stared out at a rainy evening and thought "I wish I was in Dixie," and then, fiddle in hand, worked out the melody. A variant from 1903 places him by a window on a drizzly day when "the old circus feeling came over me" and he wrote the first verses in ten minutes. In his final years, Emmett even claimed he had written the song before he moved to New York, and an article in The Washington Post supported a composition date as early as 1843.

  The most serious challenge to Emmett's claim during his lifetime came from a Southerner named William Shakespeare Hays, who attempted to prove his allegations through a Southern historical society but died before producing any conclusive evidence. Emmett himself once noted that "show people generally, if not always, have the chance to hear every local song as they pass through the different sections of the country, and particularly so with minstrel companies, who are always on the look out for songs and sayings." He also acknowledged basing the first part of "Dixie" on a song he described as "a song of his childhood days," and credited the tune additionally to an old circus song. Musical analysis does show similarities between "Dixie" and earlier compositions, but stops short of calling them closely related. Firth, Pond & Co. ultimately paid Emmett $300 for all rights to "Dixie" on the 11th of February, 1861, perhaps fearing legal complications as the Civil War loomed.

• 3. Black Voices in the Shadows

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  On at least one occasion, Emmett attributed "Dixie" to an unnamed Southern black man, and some contemporaries said the song was based on an old African American folk tune. This attribution fits the wider pattern of minstrelsy: performers routinely billed themselves as authentic recorders of slave material, yet rarely named the Black songwriters they encountered. A tradition from Mount Vernon, Ohio, dating to at least the 1910s or 1920s, holds that Emmett collaborated with a pair of Black musicians named Ben and Lew Snowden of the Snowden Family Band.

  That specific tradition has a problem: Ben and Lew Snowden would have been small children in 1860, when the song appeared. Researchers Howard L. Sacks and Judith Sacks proposed that the legend might be off by a generation, suggesting Emmett could instead have worked with the Snowden parents, Thomas and Ellen. Advocates of this theory read the lyrics of "Dixie" as a protest through irony and parody against slavery itself. When Lew Snowden died in 1923, he owned a small box of newspaper clippings asserting Emmett's authorship, along with a framed photograph of Emmett with the words "Author of 'Dixie'!" written beneath the minstrel's name. That detail cuts both ways: it may show that Snowden accepted Emmett's claim, or it may show that Snowden was himself contesting it by preserving every public assertion he could find.

  Scholars such as Clint Johnson, Robert James Branham, and Stephen J. Hartnett accept or at least allow for the possibility of Black origin. Others, such as E. Lawrence Abel, dismiss the Snowden claims outright. What is not disputed is that "Dixie" is the only song Emmett ever described as the result of a burst of inspiration; analysis of his notes shows, instead, a meticulous copyist who spent countless hours collecting and composing for the minstrel stage, with little evidence of improvisational moments.

• 4. How a Song Is Built

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  "Dixie" is structured into five two-measure groups following an AABC pattern of alternating verses and refrains. When first performed, a soloist or small group sang the verses while the full company answered at different points; the repeated phrase "look away" was likely sung in unison. As the song spread, audiences joined the chorus themselves. The tempo originally played was slower than the version commonly heard today. Musicologist Hans Nathan noted that the music is characterized by a heavy, nonchalant, inelegant strut, set in duple meter, which made it work equally well for dancing and for marching.

  The melody relies on a single rhythmic motive, two sixteenth-note pickups followed by a longer note, woven into long melodic phrases. The chorus in particular emulates natural inflections of speech, especially on the word "away," which Nathan credited as one reason for the song's spread. The melodic material draws heavily on arpeggiations of the tonic triad, keeping it firmly in a major key.

  According to Nathan, Emmett drew on several earlier works when writing "Dixie." The first part was anticipated by his own "De Wild Goose-Nation" from 1844, which itself derived from "Gumbo Chaff" of the 1830s, which in turn traced back to an 18th-century English song called "Bow Wow Wow." The second part is possibly related to Scottish folk songs. The chorus follows portions of Emmett's "Johnny Roach," performed earlier in February of 1859, which had already introduced the phrase "Dixie's land." When performed as a walkaround, the accompanying dance tune was "Albany Beef," an Irish-style reel that Emmett later included in an instructional book he co-authored in 1862. Dancers stepped between verses, and a single performer used the fiddle solo at the song's end to strut, twirl a cane, and perhaps wink at someone in the front row.

• 5. A Song Goes to War

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  The Rumsey and Newcomb Minstrels brought "Dixie" to New Orleans in March 1860, where it became the hit of their show. The following April, a performer named Mrs. John Wood sang it in a John Brougham burlesque called Po-ca-hon-tas, or The Gentle Savage. New Orleans audiences demanded no fewer than seven encores. Local publisher P. P. Werlein moved quickly to capitalize, printing the song and crediting the music to a J. C. Viereck and crediting lyrics to Newcomb. When Newcomb denied authorship, Werlein changed the credit to W. H. Peters. Firth, Pond & Co. threatened to sue, noting that their publication date preceded Werlein's. Emmett later recalled that Werlein had sent him a letter offering to buy the rights for $5.

  By December 20 of 1860, secessionists in Charleston, South Carolina, were having a band play "Dixie" after each vote for secession at St. Andrew's Hall. On the 18th of February, 1861, the song took on something close to official status when it was played at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, arranged as a quickstep by Herman Frank Arnold. Emmett reportedly told a fellow minstrel that year, "If I had known to what use they were going to put my song, I will be damned if I'd have written it."

  Confederate Henry Hotze wrote in May 1861 that the song had spread "with wild-fire rapidity" across the South, and that it "bids fair to become the musical symbol of a new nationality." Confederate soldiers preferred war versions of the lyrics, such as those written by Albert Pike and published in the Natchez, Mississippi, Courier on the 30th of May, 1861. These new lyrics replaced the original slave scenario with references to Southern pride and the conflict itself, and the tempo quickened to suit marching. Poet John Hill Hewitt wrote in 1862 that "The homely air of 'Dixie,' of extremely doubtful origin... is generally believed to have sprung from a noble stock of Southern stevedore melodies," as Southerners worked to give the song a grander origin than an Ohio minstrel's New York apartment.

  Northern abolitionists had their own claim on the song. Frances J. Crosby published "Dixie for the Union" and "Dixie Unionized" even before the fall of Fort Sumter. Union troops sang parody versions that turned the song's imagery toward camp life, with lines about pork, cabbage, and paper stockings. At least 39 versions, vocal and instrumental, were published between 1860 and 1866. On the 10th of April, 1865, one day after General Robert E. Lee's surrender, Abraham Lincoln requested "Dixie" before a White House crowd, saying, "I had heard that our adversaries over the way had attempted to appropriate it. I insisted yesterday that we had fairly captured it."

• 6. A Contested Legacy

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  After the Civil War, "Dixie" slowly worked its way back into Northern life, mostly through private performances. In 1888, publishers of a Boston songbook listed it as a "patriotic song." By 1895, the Confederate Veterans' Association proposed a bipartisan celebration in honor of both the song and Emmett himself, to be held in Washington. As late as 1934, the music journal The Etude claimed that "the sectional sentiment attached to Dixie has been long forgotten; and today it is heard everywhere."

  In the 1900 census, Emmett's occupation in Knox County was simply recorded as "author of Dixie." When he was buried, the band played the song as he was lowered into the grave. His grave marker, placed 20 years after his death, confirmed the same credit. But the song's identity remained tangled with race. African American performers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle quoted "Dixie" in the song "Bandana Days" for their 1921 musical Shuffle Along. Tom Fletcher, a Black minstrel of the era, noted that Black performers entering Southern towns would play "Dixie" first, as it tended to calm audiences who might otherwise be hostile.

  In 1905, the United Daughters of the Confederacy launched a campaign to establish an official Southern version of the song, one that would remove its African American associations. Despite support from the United Confederate Veterans and the United Sons of Confederate Veterans, Emmett's death the year before had softened the effort's momentum. The campaign received 22 entries but failed to get any of them universally adopted. The song was played at the dedication of the Confederate Private Monument in Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee, on the 19th of June, 1909.

  Since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the song's associations have made it a flashpoint. Members of the 75th United States Army Band protested it in 1971. In 1989, three Black Georgia senators walked out when the Miss Georgia Sweet Potato Queen sang "Dixie" in the Georgia chamber. In 1968, the president of the University of Miami banned it from the school's band performances. Ole Miss athletics dropped it in 2016 after roughly seven decades as a fixture at football games; athletic director Ross Bjork said the change was about ensuring "that all people feel welcome." Chief Justice William Rehnquist, meanwhile, regularly included "Dixie" in his annual sing-along for the 4th Circuit Judicial Conference in Virginia, though the practice led some Black lawyers to avoid the event. The song's performers today often recombine it with other pieces: René Marie's jazz version mixes it with Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," and Mickey Newbury's "An American Trilogy" joins it with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the spiritual "All My Trials."