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Countless lyrical variants of "Dixie" exist, but the version attributed to Dan Emmett and its variations are the most popular. [4] Emmett's lyrics as they were originally intended reflect the hostile mood of many white Americans in the late 1850s towards increasing abolitionist sentiments in the United States.
The song's lyrics follow the minstrel show scenario of the freed slave longing to return to his master in the South; it was the last time Emmett would use the term "Dixie" in a song. [2] Its tune simply repeated Emmett's earlier walkaround "I Ain't Got Time to Tarry" from 1858.
Dan Emmett was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, then a frontier region. [citation needed]His grandfather, Rev. John Emmett (1759–1847), had been born in Cecil County, Maryland, and after serving as a private in the American Revolutionary War and fighting at the Battle of White Plains in New York and later in Delaware, became a Methodist minister in the then-vast frontier of Augusta County ...
Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sacks, Howard L. and Sacks, Judith Rose (1993).
I Wish I Was In Dixie's Land, 1860. Note: I Wish I Was In Dixie's Land, better known as Dixie, was written by Daniel Decatur Emmett in 1859 as a closing song for the Bryant Minstrels' performance in New York City. The term "I wish I was in Dixie" was used among circus performers to express their desire to be in the south during the winter.
The story, now in its third generation, dates to the 1910s or 1920s. It even prompted the local black American Legion post to place a new grave marker on Ben and Lew Snowden's final resting site in 1976, reading, "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett." [18] Photograph of Dan Emmett taken from the belongings of Ben and Lew Snowden.
The pining ex-slave scenario was a common idiom of blackface minstrelsy during the 1850s. Emmett would repeat it in other songs, including "Johnny Roach" and "Dixie". [2] Emmett's later "I'm Going Home to Dixie" reuses the tune to "I Ain't Got Time to Tarry".
In his later years, Hays claimed to have written the lyrics to "Dixie", a song that had enjoyed unprecedented popularity since before the American Civil War and that was by then usually attributed to minstrel show songwriter Dan Emmett.