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Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

The Roots of the term "Dixie"

There is an ongoing debate about how and when the term “Dixie” first emerged and how it came to be accepted as a stand in for the South. Is it shorthand for the Mason-Dixon line, which divided slave and free states? Perhaps it comes from the word, “dix,” which were the banknotes produced by the Bank of New Orleans. One questionable story holds that Dixie was a Manhattan slaveowner and when he moved his slaves South, they expressed a desire to return to “Dixie’s land” in New York. Emmett’s own words suggests that by the time he wrote the song, he already understood the term ‘Dixie” to be a synonym for the South.

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Digging Into Dixie "Dixie" is not only Dan Emmett’s most famous song, but it is without doubt the reason that he is still remembered and commemorated today. While he wrote other well-known songs, Mount Vernon’s historic markers did not describe the town as birthplace of Dan Emmett, composer of “Turkey in The Straw” or “The Last Boatman.” Lorle Porter, a local Mount Vernon author who published a laudatory biography of Emmett in 2008 in cooperation with the Knox County Historical Society, recognized as much when she wrote: “Daniel Decatur Emmett’s career as a successful entertainer, if tied only to his genre of minstrelsy, would certainly be forgotten except by theater historians, but his name lives on in the twenty-first century because of a single song of the hundreds which he composed. His bouncy song, composed as a dance number for a minstrel show in 1859, had a life of its own."

'Dixie" certainly did take on a life of its own. Dissertations have been written trying to explain the popularity of the song and tracking the many controversies the work has inspired. Scholars and fans alike have engaged in heated debates about the origins of the term, Dixie, and even about whether Emmett is in fact the author of the song.
The first iteration of "Dixie"—the one performed by Dan Emmett with the Bryant Minstrels in 1859—reflected the common minstrel theme of former slaves longing to return to the paradise of the southern plantation. At a time when abolitionists were fighting to demonstrate the brutality of slavery to the nation, blackface minstrels presented an opposing view: in minstrel skits and songs, masters were kind, slaves were carefree and joyful, and the plantation was a sort of paradise. The original first stanza of the song—which Bryant asked Emmett not to perform for fear of offending the audience’s religious sensibilities—included a reference to God creating “Dixie” and Adam calling it “paradise.” Emmett himself told a newspaper in 1872 that "Dixie" was a simple song with “plantation words, the purport of which is that a negro in the north feels himself out of place and thinking of his old home in the south, is made to exclaim, in the words of the song: ‘I wish I was in Dixie’s Land.’”

Dixie, written in exaggerated Negro dialect, originally included verses that are rarely acknowledged today, especially the original second verse, which is the most blatantly racist of the song by today's standards:

“In Dixie Lann de darkies grow
If white folks only plant dar toe
Dey wet di groun wid ‘bakkir smoke
Den up de darky’s head will poke.

Perhaps surprisingly, while the song has inspired multiple controversies, few of them relate to this original version and its racially offensive lyrics. That may be because the song became so wildly popular in the South soon after it was first performed. The Confederacy quickly embraced "Dixie" as a song that captured their energy and fledgling nationalist identity with its refrain about taking a stand to live and die in Dixie. As the song became an unofficial anthem of the Confederacy, new versions emerged that made the lyrics more patriotic and that removed the Negro dialect.

The jaunty tune was popular in the North as well, with versions such as “Dixie for the Union” appearing during the Civil War. Yet President Abraham Lincoln understood that "Dixie" had become a symbol of southern nationalism during the war. Indeed, in her study of the song, Cheryl Thurber documents how singing "Dixie" became a way for Lincoln’s critics to taunt him and to ensure that he knew his course of action wasn’t universally popular, especially among northern Democrats. After the end of the war, and just before his assassination, Lincoln attempted to reclaim the song and thereby challenge its cultural power as a symbol of southern defiance. On August 10, 1865, he told cheering crowds in Washington, D.C. that the North had “fairly captured” "Dixie" and it was now their “lawful prize.”

Former Confederates might have been angered by Lincoln’s claim that the North had captured "Dixie," but in the years after the Civil War, as the South sought national reconciliation based on the claim that they had fought a patriotic battle for state’s rights, not an immoral defense of slavery, southern memory activists would come to celebrate the fact that the song of the South had been written by a son of the North. "Dixie" would, for a while, assume a status as a national song, but it never lost its links to the Confederacy or the connotations stemming from its original apologist defense of slavery. And over the course of the twentieth century, "Dixie," like the Confederate flag, would become a symbol of white southern resistance to black equality.