a compendium of facts about Ohio history
by Dan Chabek
Song of the South
There is a great song of the south composed by an Ohioan. It has been around for a long time -- actually, 137 years.
It is a simple tune written on a dreary, rainy autumn Sunday in a cheap hotel flat in New York City.
Created to be remembered easily and whistled in the streets, it became a rallying cry of the Confederacy. And, strangely so, because authored by a northerner, no less.
The composer, Daniel Decatur Emmett, was producing chanty numbers for the minstrel shows, one-time popular stage-performing entertainment, when he was approached by Jerry Bryant, manager of the minstrel troupe to which Emmett then belonged.
"Write me a 'walk-around', a 'hooray song' about the old plantations," Bryant requested. "It must have a good tune. It doesn't matter so much what the words are like, but the melody must be catchy."
It was a Saturday night, and the song had to be done by Monday morning. Emmett complained there was not enough time. However, his wife Catherine urged him to take a stab at it anyway. She promised him one room all to himself on Sunday in which to concentrate.
On Sunday morning he picked up his violin, peered out of the window and viewed the carriage traffic passing along a cold, wet street.
Slowly the words and the music fell into place, coming from an expression ofttimes made by fellow showmen wishing in the wintertime to be somewhere other than up north.
Emmett, who submitted the piece on Monday, was later surprised how his plaintive offspring caught on, becoming to the South what the "Marseillaise" is to France. After all, Emmett was a staunch northerner whose father was taking an active role in helping southern slaves escape their bondage.
Perhaps, you may have guessed by now, the song is "Dixie."
Emmett
died in Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1904 -- in a little, white cottage about
a mile from where he was born in 1815.
He composed hundreds of other songs, but none that caught on as well. Hearts still beat faster and slumping torsos stretch straighter when a band bursts forth with "Way down South in de land ob cotton ..."
Daniel D. Emmett from Mentor 15 by W. D. Moffat, Crowell Publishing Co. (1927)
© 1997 Dan Chabek
Dixie's Land by Daniel
Decatur Emmett (1815-1904) from Poetry and Music
of the War Between the States