Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

The Snowden Controversy

In 1993, Howard and Judy Sacks—a Kenyon college sociology professor and an independent scholar—published a book that quickly gained national attention for its controversial argument about the authorship of "Dixie." While there had long been claims that a white southerner, not Dan Emmett, had written the song, the Sacks made a very different case. "Dixie," they argued, had been composed not by Emmett but taught to him by the Snowdens, a Black family from Knox County, who had likely written the song themselves. 

Thomas Snowden and his future wife, Ellen Cooper, were among the first Blacks to settle in Knox County. Both were born into slavery in Maryland and both travelled to Ohio with white households. Thomas Snowden arrived in Knox County in 1825, when he was about 23 years old. Ellen Cooper came in 1827, when she was just ten years old. In 1834 the couple would become the first African Americans to marry in the county. They would go on to have nine children, five of whom began performing as the Snowden Family Band in 1850. The Snowdens toured through rural Ohio, singing popular songs of the day. They sang minstrel songs, but did not perform any music that promoted demeaning stereotypes of blacks or that featured “Negro dialect.”

The idea that the Snowdens, and especially brothers Lew and Ben, first taught "Dixie" to Dan Emmett was widely accepted in Knox County’s small Black community well before the Sacks began their investigations. In 1976, a Black branch of the American Legion from Knox County, erected a headstone at the cemetery where the Snowden brothers are buried. “They taught Dixie to Dan Emmett,” the simple memorial proclaims. About four years later, Tamara Parson, a Knox County native whose black family has long roots in the area, was sent to the principal’s office after she told her fourth grade teacher that Dan Emmett hadn’t really written "Dixie." At the time, she was a student at Dan Emmett Elementary school. Howard and Judy Sacks describe first hearing about the Snowden story on a local radio talk show when a Black woman called in to tell the host that two Black men actually wrote "Dixie." The Snowdens, the Sacks write, live “as part of the collective memory of a particular community.” 

Howard and Judy Sacks were drawn to the story because of their deep interest in local artistic traditions and in the process of musical interaction, collaboration and cultural sharing that they see as a characteristic of musical creation. In 1980, they created the Dan Emmett Traditional Arts Festival as a way to celebrate local folklife of all kinds. The festival, which had no relation to the existing Mount Vernon “Dixie Days” celebration, featured a concert, fiddle and banjo contests, demonstrations of local crafts, and a square dance. They named the festival after Emmett largely as a matter of tradition, since past community celebrations had been named after him. But other local figures were honored as well; the fiddle contest was a named for a local fiddler who had a successful recording career in the 1920s, while the banjo contest was named for Lew Snowden.

In the early 1980s, the Sacks began researching the Emmett-Snowden connection and became deeply immersed in the history of the local Black community. While they discovered no conclusive evidence that Emmett had learned "Dixie" from the Snowdens, they amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Emmett had likely known the family as a young man since his grandparents lived next to the Snowden family farm. Emmett had visited Mount Vernon in the 1850s and as a minstrel always looking for new material, he may have sought out the Snowdens. "Dixie" was the only song Emmett ever claimed to write quickly and nothing else in his career suggested that he could do that. When he retired to Mount Vernon in the 1890s, Emmett lived very near to brothers Lew and Ben and likely played music with them. Among Lew Snowden’s possessions when he died in 1923 was the clipping of a newspaper article about the authorship of "Dixie" and a photograph of Dan Emmett.

Perhaps their most intriguing circumstantial evidence emerged from their reading of the song "Dixie" itself. Rather than representing a celebration of slavery, the Sacks argued, the song could be seen as “a document of black experience in the hostile North.” The Sacks interpreted "Dixie" as a lament by Black migrants from the South who were missing their families and community and who were upset about the discriminatory treatment Blacks faced in places like Ohio, which had some of the most restrictive black codes in the nation. “Dixie,” the Sacks suggested, was “protest by way of parody,” and its famous refrain about taking a stand “to lib and die in Dixie” a call to preserve Black families and their cultural heritage. 

The national, and even international press, proved eager to review and editorialize about this new interpretation. Stories about the book appeared in newspapers across the country. The Sacks were interviewed for NPR, the BBC, and the CBC. The controversy was even covered by MTV and became fodder for a Trivial Pursuit Question (“What southern anthem does a new book credit to a black family living in Ohio?”) The media coverage highlighted, not surprisingly, the potential irony of a Black family writing what had become an anthem of the white South. It also focused on the question of whether the song itself might be redeemed from its association with racism if it had actually been written by a Black family.

But locally in Knox County, the greater concern seemed to be the potential impact such a revelation might have on Dan Emmett’s reputation. While the local black community welcomed the book as a validation of their oral tradition and their heritage—Judy Sacks told an interviewer that local Black residents saw the Emmett/Snowden story "as just another example of White folks taking things from Black people without acknowledging it"—many whites in Mount Vernon were dismayed. The Sacks found that "older members of the white establishment” were particularly keen to discredit their work. Janet Jacobs, the creator of the “Dixie” coloring book and treasurer of the county historical society described the book’s argument as “ridiculous.” “It was impossible for the Snowdens to have anything to do with the song, she insisted. Lorle Porter, a retired history professor and Mount Vernon resident who wrote a laudatory biography of Dan Emmett in 2006, described the story as “suspect” and accused the Sacks of relying on “oral history of uncertain origin” and hearsay arguments “which are easily disapproved.” 

To these Emmett fans, the claim that Emmett “borrowed”—or perhaps stole—"Dixie" from the Snowdens represented a defamation of his character. They worried too about what would become of Emmett's reputation if his authorship of the song came into question, for it was "Dixie," some suggested, upon which Emmett’s claim to fame really rested. “Dan Emmett remains known today, not for his performances or his compositions of hundreds of songs, but for one song: ‘Dixie,” Lorle Porter argued. If known only as a minstrel performer, she wrote, his career "would certainly be forgotten except by theater historians" His name "lives on in the twenty-first century because of a single song of the hundreds which he composed.” The stakes, in short, were high for people who were invested in Emmett's commemoration.  

The Sacks themselves were far more interested in the complexity of this story of musical and cultural sharing than they were in the politics of commemorating Dan Emmett. To some "Dixie" was a source of pride, to others a symbol of racism, Howard Sacks told one interviewer. "What we're trying to suggest is that songs and other symbols of our cultures carry lots of meanings. . . . None of these understandings is wrong."   

Ultimately, those who worried about the impact of the Snowden theory on local celebrations of Dan Emmett needn't have feared. Some commemorations of Emmett in town now mention the possibility the he might have "borrowed" "Dixie" rather than written it. Others, like the 2010 film, "The Life and Times of Dan Emmett," continued to assert that Emmett wrote the song. For 27 years after the publication of Way Up North in Dixie, Knox County residents would come to celebrate every summer at the Dan Emmett Arts and Music Festival. The Snowden story did not represent a major challenge to local commemorative practices. But the changing political environment and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2015 did.




 

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