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Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

Prop Cut Out Hand from the production of "The Birth of Dixie," Mount Vernon, OH

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Contents of this tag:
1. Advertisement for "The Jazz Singer," 1927
3. Advertisement for "Darkest America" by Al G. Field's Refined Negro Minstrels, 1896 Advertisement for Field's Minstrels. "'Darkest America' 50 - Real Southern Negroes - 50 25 - Mobile Buck & Wing Dancers - 25 20 - The Charleston Shouters and Singers - 20 10 - Pickaninny Dancers - 10 20 - Matchless Musicians - 20 Si Hassen Ben Alis Troupe of Arabs Home Life in the South! Plantation Pastimes! Pictures of Dixie Land! Dances of the South! -- The Al. G. Field. Refined Negro Minstrels Opera House, Deseronto Monday Evg., April 20th -- Big Parade at 12.30 p. m. Plan open at Naylors." Advertisement from Deseronto Tribune, 17 April 1896, for "Darkest America", a show at Naylor's Theatre by the Al. G. Field Refined Negro Minstrels.
4. Bryant's Minstrels Walkaround, December 19, 1859
9. Drawing of the Virginia Minstrels
10. "Dandy Jim from Caroline," 1844 Virginia Minstrels Song sheet
11. Prop Cut Out Hand from the production of "The Birth of Dixie," Mount Vernon, OH
12. Prop Cut Out Hand from the production of "The Birth of Dixie," Mount Vernon, OH

This page is referenced by:

Sources This project draws on a wide array of sources, ranging from archival collections to scholarly works to ethnographic observation. There are bibliographic citations embedded throughout the project in the case of specific quotes. But if you'd like to get a better sense of the kinds of sources I looked at, or want to try to look at some of them yourself, here's a partial bibliography:
Primary Sources
Birth of Dixie Collection. VFM 2595. The Ohio History Connection. Columbus, Ohio.
Daniel Decatur Emmett Papers, MSS 355. The Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio. Columbus, Ohio.

Daniel Decatur Emmett, OVS 0848. The Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio.

Daniel Decatur Emmett, OVS 0851. The Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio.

Daniel Decatur Emmett, OVS 2846. The Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio.

Daniel Decatur Emmett Scrapbook. Mount Vernon Public Library, Mount Vernon, Ohio.

Daniel Decatur Emmett Materials, Knox County Historical Society, Mount Vernon, Ohio.

Durieux, Leroy. Birth of Dixie: an historical musical drama based on the life of Daniel Decatur Emmett. Mount Vernon, Ohio. 1969.

Galbreath, C.B. Daniel Decatur Emmett: author of Dixie. Columbus, OH: Press of Fred J. Heer, 1904.

Hartman, Jan. Old Dan; a biographical play with music and lyrics by Daniel Emmett. "First Draft." Written for the Dixie Corporation of Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, OH.

Iden, Raymond John. The origin of Negro minstrelsy and the birth of Emmett's Dixie's Land. Mount Vernon, OH: Christian Music Publishing Co., 1938.

Mary Darby Richardson Fitzhugh Papers (Mss. A F557 3), The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY.

Porter, Lorle. The Great Dan Emmett: Burnt-Cork Artist Extraordinaire. Nashport, OH: New Concord Press, 2006 Published in cooperation with the Knox County Historical Society, 2008

Wintermute, H. Ogden. Daniel Decatur Emmett. Mount Vernon, OH, 1955.

Secondary Sources
Bean, Annemarie; Hatch, James; and Brooks McNamara, ed. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1997.

Cox, Karen. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Cox, Karen. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, 2^nd ed. (University Press of Florida, 2019).

Domby, Adam. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020).

Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (Routledge, 2007).

Johnson, Stephen, ed., Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. Amherst, MA; University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Jones, Robert Huhn. "Uncle Dan Emmett's Dixie." Journal of the Illinois Press on behalf of the Illinois State Historical Society Vol 56, no. 2 (Summer 1963): 364-371.

Lhamon, W.T. Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Nathansan, Hans. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.

Sacks, Howard L. and Judith Rose. Way up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993; reprint ed., University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Saxton, Alexander. "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology." American Quarterly 27:1 (March 1975): 3-28.

Thurber, Cheryl. "'Dixie': The Cultural History of a Song and Place." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1993.

Upton, Dell. What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

To cite this project, please use the following citation form:
Renee Romano, "Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie The Commemoration of Dan Emmett," http://reneeromano.net/education/whitewashing-blackface-and-whistling-dixie/, 2021.