Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

"A Living Memorial": The Dixie Corporation and Dan Emmett Heritage Tourism

In 1966, Isabelle Wintermute, the widow of Ogden Wintermute, saw a historical pageant about Daniel Boone performed in Kentucky. Ogden Wintermute had dreamed of creating a historical pageant to honor Dan Emmett in Mount Vernon. After she arrived back home, his widow set out to try to realize his dream. She brought her idea to the Knox County Arts Council and in 1967, the Mount Vernon Dixie Corporation was born.

The nonprofit Dixie Corporation began with the goal of producing a historical musical drama about Dan Emmett and his writing of the song, “Dixie,” but they were thinking big right from the start. The right show, some members of the corporation believed, could put Mount Vernon on the map and become a major summer tourist attraction for the city. Summer plays and pageants, often performed outdoors, were growing in number and popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a form of family entertainment and the Dixie Corporation saw a great opportunity to attract tourist dollars through the music and story of Dan Emmett. Indeed, they estimated that a Dixie pageant that ran for two months every summer might be able to attract as many as one hundred tourists a day to Mount Vernon, create more than one hundred new jobs, and lead to more than a million dollars in additional retail sales for local merchants.

Of course, they knew it would not be easy to achieve such ambitious goals. The project started small with the premiere of "The Birth of Dixie" at the Memorial Theater over two weekends in November 1968. In 1969, a revised version of the show ran for 9 performances during the summer; by 1970, a cast of 55 offered six weekends of performances. A year later, "Dixie: The Dan Emmett Story," had replaced the "Birth of Dixie," and the corporation had begun hiring a handful of professional actors and musicians. Some local merchants eagerly embraced the potential for Emmett-related tourism. At Wise Jewelers in downtown Mount Vernon, visitors could buy gold and sterling Dixie charms. The Dixie Corporation staged some version of a show telling the story of Dan Emmett and "Dixie" at the Memorial Theater in Mount Vernon every year between 1968 and 1974. 

Mount Vernon community leaders decided to go all-in on Emmett and "Dixie" as the basis for their heritage tourism plans at a time of immense racial unrest in the United States. In 1968, the year Martin Luther King was assassinated, there were more than 200 race riots across the nation. The Black Power Movement exploded into the American consciousness when two African American sprinters bowed their heads and raised their fists in protest when the national anthem played at a medal ceremony at the Olympics.

It was also a time of intensifying protests against the song, "Dixie" and what it symbolized. In 1968, thirty black students in Jonesboro, Arkansas walked out of a pep rally when the band played the song, which they described as a “a badge of slavery.” In Miami, black parents asked federal authorities to withhold money from the Miami-Dade school system until they stopped playing "Dixie" and using Confederate symbols at football games. In Alabama, the Lowndes County Branch of the NAACP denounced "Dixie" as a “symbol of white superiority and white supremacy.” Alabama’s extremist segregationist governor responded by threatening to have a band perform the song every day from the state capitol.

Locals in Mount Vernon were aware of these controversies. Indeed, an article in the Mount Vernon News in November 1968 declared that while the inaugural performances of “Birth of Dixie” had been a local success, it remained a “big question of how well a show such as ‘The Birth of Dixie’ will be received outside the community.” “We should not try to play down the fact that we are trying to promote a community ‘Dixie’ show at a time when the song itself has become a matter of considerable controversy in the nation’s racial conflicts and tensions," the article argued. Yet that is exactly what the Dixie Corporation decided to do.

The challenge for the corporation was compounded by the fact that Dan Emmett had made his name by performing in blackface. They were trying to stage a rollicking, feel-good show about Dan Emmett at a time when blackface was increasingly seen as offensive and when African Americans had begun openly denouncing Confederate symbols like "Dixie." The Dixie Corporation struggled with how to inoculate Emmett and his famed song from charges of racism. They initially hired New York playwright Jan Hartman to write the script for the show, but they did not like his draft of “Old Dan.” Hartman’s script featured numerous scenes of blackface performances and included several scenes drawn verbatim from skits and “Negro sermons” written by Emmett for his minstrel troupes, many including the derogatory term, “nigger.” But Hartman’s scripts took steps to ensure that the audience would know that Emmett himself was not racist. The story in fact opened with young Dan visiting the Snowdens, a local black musical family in Mount Vernon, who are portrayed as both teaching him music and helping him get a start as a professional performer. At one point in the play, Emmett says of the Snowdens, “Lord how I loved them! I looked on them as though they were gods!” The very next scene showed young Emmett’s father taking in a runaway slave as a stop on the Underground Railroad and Dan treating the escapee with respect. This story—that Abraham Emmett was part of the Underground Railroad—is a kind of urban legend of Mount Vernon, although there is no evidence to support it. Later scenes showed slaves coming in from fields with Hartman pointedly offering the note that “these are not happy, singing slaves. They are plodders, deeply exhausted by their day’s work.” In short, Hartman’s script offered a realistic portrayal of blackface minstrel shows wrapped in a largely fictional story of Dan Emmett’s love and respect for people of color.

The board of the Dixie Corporation rejected this approach and they instead asked lifetime Mount Vernon resident, Lee Durieux, to take on the task of writing the show. Durieux’s script of “Birth of Dixie” was much more to their liking. The show included thirty musical numbers, lots of dancing, offered vignettes of the Civil War, and pointedly did not include any scenes in blackface, although actors performing as minstrels did speak in “Negro dialect.” "Birth of Dixie" also included the Snowdens, played by local Black actors, although only performing music and doing what notes in the script described as a "choreographed dance per [the] sulky race."

The show that replaced Durieux’s in 1971 similarly rejected the idea of performers in blackface. “Dixie: The Dan Emmett Story,” was written by James Ruef, a local man who had directed the “Birth of Dixie” and starred as Dan Emmett. His new show unreservedly celebrated Emmett as a great man, the “father of minstrelsy” and “architect of the American musical stage” and took great pains to emphasize how distraught Emmett was when the Confederacy adopted “Dixie” as its anthem. But both versions of as its anthem. But both versions of the show insisted that “Dixie” was not a problematic symbol. Ruef’s script even described the song as “an international bridge to the hope of a united world.” Programs and promotional brochures for the productions argued that Emmett's song “should never be a symbol of separatism, inspired, as it was, by a boundless fellowship.” Yet these declarations that “Dixie” was a symbol of unity, even across race lines, reflected a stark denial of reality. By the time “Birth of Dixie” first premiered, “Dixie” had become both a symbol of separatism—between blacks and whites more than North and South—and of racism. Ignoring that truth did not change it.

The choice of language—that “Dixie” “should never be” a symbol of separatism—suggests that the people involved with the show were well aware that the song was in fact exactly that kind of symbol. Turning Dan Emmett and "Dixie" into a major heritage tourism initiative in the late 1960s required that Mount Vernon residents whitewash blackface and whistle Dixie. Celebrating a blackface performer and his most famous turn required exonerating arguments in a way that had not been required twenty-five years earlier, when Bing Crosby’s blackface Dan Emmett was playing on movie screens nationwide. 

In 1970, a local newspaper reported that “Daniel Decatur Emmett, Mt. Vernon’s most famous son, is rapidly becoming an institution, a tourist attraction and a business”, but in truth, the ambitious dreams of the Dixie Corporation were never realized. By 1973, the corporation faced such serious financial shortfalls that they questioned whether they would even be able to mount the production that year. They organized all kinds of fundraising efforts, including sponsoring a Dixie Ball at the local country club, selling cider jelly and candy bars, and even collecting bottles for recycling. Even so, they had to scale down the budget for the 1973 production from $81,000 to $12,000. They would stage scaled-down versions of the show for two more years before abandoning their vision of a summer theater extravaganza that could serve as the basis for a major tourism campaign. 

Yet Mount Vernon boosters did not give up on Emmett and "Dixie." In 1974, Dan Emmett’s birth home was saved from demolition once again, bought by the Jaycees and moved to a new location where it could be preserved and eventually again turned into a house museum. Dixie Days, a weekend arts festival that had begun as part of the Dixie Corporation’s push to make Mount Vernon a major festival town in Ohio, would continue. And like the theatrical shows, Mount Vernon’s commemoration of Emmett would continue to celebrate his accomplishments without acknowledging either his history as a blackface performer or the controversy about the song "Dixie."

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