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• 1 2020-10-18T23:53:22+00:00 Who Was Dan Emmett? 31 Some Biographical Background on Mount Vernon's Favorite Son plain 80 2021-09-02T18:29:57+00:00 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. 
• 1 media/VA Minstrels Iden.JPG 2020-12-10T02:14:47+00:00 A Brief History of Blackface 18 Emmett's Place in the History of Blackface Performance image_header 2021-09-02T18:31:21+00:00 Blackface minstrelsy, described as a “strange but persistent performance idiom” by one scholar of the practice, was the first uniquely American form of entertainment. For a long time, it was also America's most popular type of entertainment. The practice got its start in the 1820s, when individual white men began to blacken their faces and perform as “Ethiopian delineators.” Blackface performers would use burnt cork or grease paint to darken their skin, put white greasepaint around their mouths to create the appearance of overly large lips, and don wigs of black curly hair. Dressed in tatters or as clowns, blackface performers spoke in exaggerated Negro dialect and sung, danced, and performed comic skits to entertain their audiences. 
  
  Daniel Decatur Emmett was a seminal figure in the development of blackface minstrelsy; indeed, some scholars of blackface draw a line between blackface before Emmett arrived on the scene and blackface after he created the Virginia Minstrels. They argue that blackface before Emmett—when it was still being performed mainly by individual “Ethiopian delineators” on the streets rather than in formal theaters—should be understood as a kind of folk theatrical that offered a way for working class whites to express some solidarity with poor blacks against the white elite and to critique their shared social and political conditions. Historians like W.T. Llamon and Dale Cockrell argue that disempowered whites in the 1830s donned blackface as a way to critique authority, to express frustration with white elites, and to encourage interracial solidarity among poor whites and blacks. Early blackface, these scholars suggest, was not intrinsically racist.
  
  But that changed with the arrival of Emmett and his group, the Virginia Minstrels, on the scene in 1843. Dan Emmett helped turn blackface from a working class street performance to a commercial enterprise aimed at middle class whites. His Virginia Minstrels brought together a group of four performers who did shows in theaters for paying audiences. Their act included music, dancing, comedic dialogue, “stump speeches” of nonsense oratory done in Negro dialect, and walkaround numbers that involved music and dance set on a plantation. Minstrel performers created a cast of stereotypical black characters that were clownish, lazy, hypersexualized, arrogant, and prone to crime. The two main characterizations—of Sambo, a happy-go-lucky slave, and Zip Coon, an arrogant black man in the North—both worked as a kind of defense of slavery by promoting the myth of a benign plantation and by suggesting that blacks in the North were inept fools who did not belong. 
  
  With the advent of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, minstrelsy became less a form of political subversion—using “the Other” to protest your own social and political situation—than a mockery of the Other. As historian Stephen Johnson writes, “the commercial needs of the early minstrel show altered its most immediate roots in folk tradition and popular street performance, increasingly emphasizing the exhibition of that ‘other’ culture being represented, over confronting one’s own.” The Virginia Minstrels, Johnson argues, “promoted particularly grotesque portrayals of blacks.” Emmett’s group, and the many minstrel troupes its success inspired, denigrated blacks for profit and they had a long and damaging legacy. Dale Cockrell, a historian who argues that Emmett’s creation of the Virginia Minstrels represented a stark turning point in the history of blackface, argues that “by the last third of the century, blackface minstrelsy had become what the Virginia Minstrels forecast: a weapon by which one group of Americans defined, marginalized, and contained another.” 
  
  Blackface minstrelsy went on to dominate early American commercial popular culture, eventually evolving into vaudeville and shaping the history of early motion pictures. Watching these stereotyped performances of blacks allowed whites to feel confident in their superiority. Even when black performers broke into show business after the Civil War, they had to themselves perform as minstrels, acting out the stereotypes that whites had created. The stereotypes and racist symbols blackface performers created have circulated in American popular culture ever since. Although blackface performance had largely disappeared from the American stage and movie screens by the 1950s, it has not disappeared from our national culture. Whites continue to don blackface and to enact the stereotypes associated with it at college parties and in Halloween costumes. The demeaning caricatures that Dan Emmett helped popularize have surely been one of the most influential aspects of his legacy.