University of Virginia Library

AUTHORSHIP AND HISTORY OF "DIXIE."

The following history of "Dixie" is vouched for as
the true one, based upon authenticated facts, as preserved
by Captain B. H. Teague, of Aiken, S. C.

The writer to whom we are indebted for this compilation
of facts relative to this famous war song,
says that Dan Emmet, the minstrel, wrote it in New
York city in 1859 or 1860, and it was copyrighted as
being sung at Bryant's. It soon became a local
favorite as a negro walk-around, having a catching
musical air that Emmet does not claim to have written.
The words are the veriest doggerel, and were
put to music (in the usual way with the melodies of
minstrels) through the art of the musical director
and his orchestra.

That Emmet was inspired to write "Dixie" by any
patriotic or other thought or knowledge of the South,
is absurd. That he could have supposed his production
was to be a Southern war song, is utterly impossible.
And in the adoption of the word "Dixie," he
probably caught at it as a meaningless negroism that
would stand for the South when associated with

"cotton," in a song supposed to be sung in the negro
plantation dialect, just as Stephen C. Foster, supposing
there were more slaves the farther one penetrated
the South, selected the Suwannee river, in
Florida, (where there were very few negroes) as the
scene of his immortal melody—"Old Folks at Home."

As a matter of fact, Emmet knew nothing personally
of the South or of its institutions. He belonged
to the stock of a minstrel company that did not, like
West's and Rumsey's and Kunkel's, travel through
the South. Bryant's, and Wood's and Butler's and
Christy's and Buckly's minstrels, respectively, had
halls of their own, and courted only metropolitan
patronage.

In December, 1860, during the exciting scenes
immediately preceding South Carolina's formal withdrawal
from the Union, and while Charleston was
alive with local troops daily and hourly on parade,
Rumsey & Newcomb's minstrel troup came to that
city and played to crowded audiences for a week.
Incidentally to these performances the popular walk-around
of "Dixie" was given as a climax. The local
military bands, having repudiated all the national
airs, were in sore straits for martial music, and
eagerly caught up "Dixie," already being whistled
through the streets by the little negroes; and the
new song, played as a march, though repeated ad

infinitum, held its popularity and rapidly spread over
the Cotton States. These Charleston bands at the
head of South Carolina troops, were the first to enter
Virginia, and they quickly impregnated the spirit of
the young Confederacy with the inspiring measures
of the minstrel break-down, that will forever awaken
Southern enthusiasm wherever it may be heard.