Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

Who Was Dan Emmett?

Daniel Decatur Emmett gained fame and a national reputation as a composer and practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. In the 19th century, blackface performance was the most popular cultural form in America. White men would darken their face using cork—the practice was sometimes called burnt cork performance—and pretend that they were black while performing comedic songs and skits. While blackface performance is today nearly uniformly considered racist and offensive, its practice was widespread as late as the 1950s.

Emmett came to minstrelsy after a childhood spent in Ohio, which was then on America’s far west frontier. Emmett’s grandfather moved his family to Ohio from Virginia in 1807. Emmett’s father, blacksmith Abraham Emmett, married Sarah Zerrick in 1812 and their firstborn, Daniel, arrived soon after Abraham returned from fighting in the War of 1812. Dan Emmett’s middle name—Decatur—honors Stephen Decatur, a naval hero from that war. 

Like many children at the time, Emmett’s formal education only lasted until age twelve. At thirteen, he began training as a printer’s apprentice. But music was Emmett’s real love. Brought up in a musical household, he learned to play the flute and fiddle. By the time he was fifteen, he had written his first song, “Old Dan Tucker,” and begun performing for his neighbors. After a brief stint in the army, where Emmett became an expert in fife and drum, he joined a travelling circus. It was as a circus performer in 1835 that Emmett began performing in blackface and composing "Ethiopian" songs in exaggerated Negro dialect.

The young performer soon moved on to New York to seek his fortunes there. By 1842, Emmett was living in New York and performing in a “fiddle and bones” duo with blackface singer and dancer Frank Bower. His career really took off a year later when he and Bower began performing with two other musicians as the Virginia Minstrels. This four-man minstrel show was a departure from the typical one or two-man minstrel performances. The Virginia Minstrels also pioneered a new kind of entertainment. They advertised an entire evening of blackface minstrelsy with songs, skits, dancing, and comedic sermons, all of which, they promised, would be “entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas.” Emmett wrote much of the music and many of the sermons and skits for the shows. The Virginia Minstrels proved such a huge success in New York that they left for a tour of England. By the time they returned in 1844, many other four-man minstrel troupes had begun performing and Emmett would spend the next fourteen years forming new minstrel groups, founding the first minstrel theater in Chicago (“Emmett’s Burlesque Ethiopian Varieties”), and continuing to write music. 

Emmett wrote his most famous song, "Dixie", in 1859, a year after being recruited to join the successful New York troupe, the Byrant’s Minstrels, as a performer and principal songwriter. Bryant’s Minstrels were well-known for their finales which typically depicted the life of slaves on a southern plantation and featured singing and dancing by all members of the troupe in what became known as a “walkaround.” Emmett wrote "Dixie"—supposedly in a single sitting,—as a walkaround and it became instantly popular, first in the show, and then nationally. By 1861, a version of "Dixie" had become popular throughout the South as a kind of anthem for the Confederacy. Emmett spent the Civil War working with the Bryant Minstrel’s. A supporter of the Union, Emmett did not appreciate the South’s use of the song to support their cause, but like most other blackface performers, Emmett was a Democrat who believed that ending slavery was not necessary to preserve the union. 

Emmett’s career reached its apex in the heady days of the Civil War. In 1866, he moved back to Chicago where he performed with a minstrel troupe, played fiddle at saloons, and gradually fell into such poverty that younger minstrels staged benefits to raise money for him in the early 1880s. In 1888, at the age of 73, Emmett returned to his hometown of Mount Vernon. Back home after more than fifty years, Emmett built a one-room cabin, lived off a small pension from the Actor’s Fund of New York City, and performed with local musicians. 

Emmett’s star would rise one more time: in 1895, Al. G. Field asked him to join the tour of his Columbus-based minstrel company, the Field’s Minstrels, as they toured Ohio and the South. Emmett, now an elderly man, would come out on stage and sing his signature tune, "Dixie." Performances in Ohio earned polite applause, but Emmett became the showstopper once the troupe reached the South. In Richmond, where "Dixie" had been played at the 1861 inauguration of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, women threw flowers at him and the Virginia elite came to pay him their respects. Fields marveled that even though old Dan Emmett’s voice was largely gone, every time he stood to sing "Dixie" in the South, “the audience went as nearly wild as any I have ever seen. It seemed to me a if they would actually raise the roof from the theater.” Emmett proved so popular that Fields named one of his circus cars, “The Dan Emmett.” 

Emmett returned to Mount Vernon in 1896 to live out his final years, where he made money by selling autographed copies of "Dixie" and by taking donations from southern fans, some of whom came to visit him in Ohio. He would perform one last time, at a show sponsored by the Mount Vernon Elks in 1902. When he died in 1904 at the age of 89, Al. G. Fields led the procession to the cemetery as a band played Emmett's most celebrated song. 

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