"A Living Memorial": Dan Emmett and 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, and once 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. [1971 BOD Program]
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 [Boston Globe article] 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. That could mean more than one hundred new jobs, $78,000 in tax receipts for the city, and more than a million dollars in additional retail sales.
Of course, it would take a while to reach that level. First the Dixie Corporation needed a script, so with an initial $5000 budget, they hired a professional New York playwright to write the show. Unhappy with the results, the corporation instead turned to lifetime Mount Vernon resident, Lee Durieux, who came up with a musical extravaganza that ran for more than three hours and included as many as thirty songs, many by Dan Emmett but some also written by Durieux himself. “The Birth of Dixie” premiered in November 1968 and ran for four performances. But every year, the production expanded. In 1969, a revised version ran for 9 performances over the summer; by 1970, a cast of 55 offered six weekends of performances. By 1971, a new show, "Dixie: The Dan Emmett Story," had replaced the "Birth of Dixie," the corporation had begun hiring some professional actors and musicians, and and some local merchants were eagerly embracing Dixie tie-ins. At Wise Jewelers in downtown Mount Vernon, visitors could buy gold and sterling Dixie charms.
Mount Vernon community leaders decided to go all-in on Emmett and Dixie as a heritage tourism project the same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated. 1968 was the year of the “Long Hot Summer” when there were more than 200 race riots across the nation and when Black Power 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 Dixie, which they described as a “a badge of slavery.” Several of the students filed a suit with a federal district court to prevent the school from engaging in practices, like playing Dixie, which “tend to promote division of pupils across race line.” 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 insisted. Yet playing down both the controversy over Dixie and the fact that had performed in blackface proved to be exactly what the Dixie Corporation chose to do.
although it quickly went on to remind readers that Abraham Lincoln had liked Dixie and that Emmett supposedly “knew, understood, loved, and respected the Negro of his day.” [MV News, 11/19/68]
"The Dixie Project" is more than just a song, and more than a show. The Dixie project, which has become almost a way of life for many people in Knox County, is a way of preserving our heritage and making it live again. ‘Dixie’ is a living memorial. Some communities erect stone monuments to the memories of their famous sons, some preserve their birthplaces. In Mount Vernon and Knox County many people prefer to play and sing an Emmett’s tunes eery summer. The goal of the project is to create a greater national awareness of and interest in Emmett’s musical compositions and the entire era of American minstrelsy, which began with Emmett’s unique combination called the ‘Virginia Minstrels,’ developed into vaudeville and modern musical comedy, and may even have been the origin of modern jazz.”