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Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

Emmett House Museum

In 1954, Ogden Wintermute and Robert Eastman had saved the house from destruction and moved it from its original location at the corner of South Mulberry and West Ohio streets to a parking lot behind Eastman's medical office at East High and North Gay Streets. While Eastman and Wintermute spent time restoring the home and briefly briefly operated it as a house museum, the project soon fizzled and the home was turned into a doctor's office. Threatened again in the early 1970s by plans to build a parking lot, the Jaycees raised funds to move the home to the banks of the Kokosing River, near the Station Break senior center. Mount Vernon's second most famous son, the comic personality Paul Lynde, donated money to help save the house. It was moved in 1974 and remained in that location until the house burned down in an arson attack in 2014. Ironically, after the house burned down it was determined that it could not, in fact, have been Emmett's birthplace.

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Still Dreaming of Dixie In 1987, Mount Vernon News columnist Hal Clawson lamented that Mount Vernon was not doing more to celebrate the legacy of Dan Emmett. Emmett, he insisted, had "never received his due in his home town" because some looked down on him since he was poor. For Clawson, this was a missed opportunity. Mount Vernon, he wrote, “could very well capitalize on this noted minstrel man and song writer if it really put its heart to the task.” They needed a promotional organization, like a “Dan Emmett Society” to lead efforts to use Emmett to encourage tourism. He was sure that if the community pulled together, they could attract thousands of visitors each year. “It is still not too late for Mount Vernon to REALLY demonstrate it is proud to have been the birthplace of Daniel Decatur Emmett.”

Clawson’s complaints seemed oddly disconnected from reality. Far from “never receiving his due,” Mount Vernon had in fact crafted a major heritage tourism campaign around Emmett in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the Dixie Corporation doing the work that Clawson imagined an Emmett Society would do. And even as Clawson published his column, Mount Vernon's pride in being Emmett's hometown was demonstrated in any number of ways. Mount Vernon police continued to wear patches that honored Emmett, a practice that would not be discontinued for another thirty years. The sporadic summer festival known as “Dixie Days,” first held in the 1950s, became a regular annual event by 1975, replete with sidewalk sales, an arts and crafts show, beauty pageants and musical performances. In 1990, just three years after Clawson's column appeared, the Mount Vernon/Knox County Area Chamber of Commerce decided to feature Dan Emmett on its annual Christmas ornament, which was available for purchase at local businesses and the historical museum.

From the 1980s through the 2000s, in fact, Mount Vernon would repeatedly seek to capitalize on Emmett and "Dixie," albeit without the unifying force of a single group like the Dixie Corporation coordinating the efforts. Despite the fact that Emmett's most famous song and the blackface performance that had been his claim to fame were increasingly suspect in post-civil rights America, Mount Vernon would continue to seek ways to honor Emmett and capitalize on his legacy, even if that meant ignoring the racial issues that commemorating him raised.

That push took three main forms during this era. First were the efforts to save and restore Dan Emmett's birthplace home so it could be opened to visitors. That home, already saved once from the wrecking ball, was threatened again in 1974 when the bank next to its downtown location announced plans to raze it to put in a parking lot. This time, the local Jaycees rallied to raise the money necessary to move the house to a new site near the Kokosing River, where it would languish for the rest of the decade.

But in 1981, the Knox County Historical Society arranged to lease the property from the city so that they could restore it and open it to visitors. Historical Society president Bill Fetters expressed his intent to maintain the house at a high standard to honor all of those who "have kept the spirit of Dixie alive in the hearts of those that call Mount Vernon home." The Historical Society really envisioned the house as a "shrine to one of the nation's humblest yet most distinguished bards," as one document explained. They restored the first floor of the home to look like it might have looked in Emmett's day, opened the property to visitors during the Christmas holidays and the annual summer festival, and jumped at the chance to take over ownership of the house from the city so they could more effectively preserve the property. By the 1990s, a visit to Dan Emmett's house had become part of the Mount Vernon schools curriculum, with every third grade class visiting in May. Each child was given a coloring book about Dan Emmett's life that had originally been designed for the Mount Vernon Dixie Corporation. With intertwined U.S. and Confederate flags, this “Dixie” coloring book again reflected the powerful connections between commemoration of Emmett and the cause of the Confederacy.

The second major initiative of this era was rebranding and rebooting “Dixie Days” to turn an annual festival that had become a glorified sidewalk sale into a major event that would attract outside visitors. Much of the enthusiasm around “Dixie Days” had waned by the late 1970s. It was no longer the kind of cultural event that it had once been, the president of the Knox County Renaissance Foundation explained in 1988. So the foundation and the Knox County Historical Society decided to inaugurate a new annual celebration: a 3-day Dan Emmett Arts and Music Festival. Knox County, Renaissance Foundation president Tim Tyler insisted was “a place whose environment is rivaled by only one thing...its potential." The bigger and better the festival “the better it will be for the community, and the better our future will be." That first festival featured 22 musical acts ranging from blue grass to rock to fife and drum, an antique car show, food, arts and craft booths, and of course, tours of the Dan Emmett house among other important local historic locations. In later years, it would grow to variously feature multiple stages, a road race, a baby crawl contest, Civil War reenactments, and eventually a Knox Idol singing contest, modeled on the hit American Idol competition. Festival boosters framed the event as a celebration of “the historical heritage of our community through the music and the arts," but in truth there were only occasional references to Emmett. In some years, a group calling themselves the Dan Emmett Singers performed his music as part of the festival, but among the fried dough and dancing, the most notable acknowledgement of Emmett's actual history was the festival's logo: a silhouette of a blackface performer sitting in a chair.

There were occasional dissenters who questioned the practicality of Knox County developing a heritage tourism campaign around Dan Emmett. Nevertheless, when two local businessmen decided to develop a new hotel and conference center complex in Mount Vernon, they named it after the city's famous son. In 1996, the Dan Emmett House Hotel and Dan Emmett Conference and Banquet Center opened just a few blocks south of downtown Mount Vernon. Old Dan's Playhouse & Tavern, which featured both an old time saloon and a stage for live theater, was added to the $3 million dollar complex the following year. Diners at Old Dan's could enjoy dishes like “Confederate Dip and Chips,” “Minstrel Quartet,” “Turkey in De Straw” sandwich, and “Dixie” chicken grille.

The new Dan Emmett complex in Mount Vernon opened as a heated debate continued to rage nationally about the song “Dixie.” In 1998, Woodland Hills High School near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania attracted national media attention when they planned a high school marching band Civil War program that included the Confederate flag and the song. Black students and parents, as well as local branches of the NAACP and Urban League, complained about the program. “There are too many symbols attached to that song and you can't strip them away,” a musicologist interviewed about the show argued. “It's a symbol of the Old South. I don't know how you can clean up 'Dixie.'" The following year, the song again became a point of national controversy when U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist included “Dixie” at his annual sing-along at a Virginia judicial conference. A black lawyer who refused to attend the sing-along explained that “The song is offensive to African Americans" because “it's nostalgic for slavery.” The president of a black legal association was dismayed that the sing-along included a song that "is a vestige of the badges of slavery,” and feared that it reflected the Rehnquist court's overall lack of sensitivity to minority concerns.

This ongoing debate over “Dixie” and Emmett's role as a blackface performer did not seem to concern residents of Knox County. Both the mayor and the director of the local historical museum were present when members of the Ohio Division of the Daughters of the Confederacy gathered in Mount Vernon in 2006 to rededicate their 1931 memorial to Dan Emmett while a “rousing rendition of Dixie” played in the background. The UDC chapter had held their banquet, “A Dixie Homecoming,” the previous evening at the Dan Emmett Conference and Banquet Center. The short professional film, The Life and Times of Dan Emmett, produced in 2010 to promote the Dan Emmett Arts and Music Festival, highlighted the enduring popularity of Emmett's music, the importance of minstrelsy in giving rise to many forms of American popular entertainment, and Emmett's own “enormous” contribution to American popular culture, but had little to say about the more negative legacies of blackface minstrelsy or the racial divisiveness of “Dixie.”

Instead, the controversy that would attract the attention of Knox County residents was a very different one: a renewed debate over whether Emmett had written the song at all, or whether, in fact, the song had been written by the Snowdens, one of the few Black families living in Knox county in the early 19th century.

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Postcard #4, Birthplace of Daniel Decatur Emmett, date unknown