Dixie

The story

"Dixie" was written for the blackface minstrel stage, where white performers blacked their faces to caricature enslaved African Americans. Bryant's Minstrels first performed it as "Dixie's Land" at Mechanics' Hall, New York, on 4 April 1859, billed as a "plantation song and dance": a walkaround in which a few minstrels acted out the words and the whole company joined in. Most sources credit the Ohio-born minstrel Daniel Decatur Emmett, who published it with Firth, Pond & Co. on 21 June 1860, though his own accounts of writing it varied and by 1908 no fewer than 37 people had claimed it. Emmett once attributed it to an unnamed Southern Black man, and a Mount Vernon, Ohio, tradition links it to the Black musicians of the Snowden family; some scholars accept a Black origin or allow for it, others dismiss it. Its words, sung in a mock Black dialect, give the voice of a freed slave homesick for the plantation, and present slavery as a positive good: of all the minstrel tunes, it made that case most strongly. Because it was a dance tune, it made light of slavery as well.

The song became a hit across the country and abroad. Abraham Lincoln liked it and it was played during his 1860 campaign. In New Orleans in 1860 it was the hit of the Rumsey and Newcomb Minstrels, and Mrs. John Wood's singing in a burlesque drew seven encores; the publisher P. P. Werlein printed a version without the dialect. Secessionists soon took it as their own. On 20 December 1860 a band played it after each vote for secession in Charleston, South Carolina, and on 18 February 1861 it was played at Jefferson Davis's inauguration as president of the Confederacy. Emmett reportedly said that year that had he known what use it would be put to, he would not have written it. Albert Pike and others wrote war verses, and it was probably the Confederate soldiers' most popular song on the march, in battle and in camp. In the North, Frances J. Crosby wrote Union versions, Union bands played it until 1863, and on 10 April 1865, the day after Robert E. Lee's surrender, Lincoln asked for it at the White House, saying the Union had fairly captured it.

After the war the song stayed bound to the South and the memory of the Confederacy. In 1905 the United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for an official Southern version that would purge its African American associations; none of the 22 entries was adopted. It was played at the dedication of Confederate monuments such as the one in Nashville's Centennial Park in 1909. Black minstrel troupes of the time played it as they arrived in Southern towns; the minstrel Tom Fletcher recalled that it calmed audiences who might otherwise be hostile to a group of Black men. Northern writers used it to signal a Southern setting, and the Black songwriters Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle quoted it in their 1921 musical Shuffle Along.

From the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans criticised "Dixie" as a racist relic of the Confederacy and a reminder of white domination and segregation, all the more when white opponents of civil rights sang it in answer to "We Shall Overcome". Students protested it at Southern universities; the University of Miami's president banned it from the band in 1968, members of the 75th United States Army Band protested it in 1971, and in 1989 three Black Georgia senators walked out when it was sung in the state's chamber. The musicologist Sam Dennison wrote that it still conjures a South ready to reassert white supremacy. Its defenders call it part of the American patriotic repertoire or of Southern heritage, and some, such as the journalist Clint Johnson and the South Carolina state senator Glenn McConnell, called the campaigns against it political correctness or cultural genocide. In 2016 the University of Mississippi stopped playing it at athletic events after some seven decades. Singers who perform it today usually drop the dialect: René Marie's jazz version sets it beside "Strange Fruit", Billie Holiday's song about a lynching.

What it says

A minstrel-show song, sung in a mock Black dialect, in which the singer longs to be back in the South where he was born. Written as a comic dance, it presented slavery as a happy home for Black people; in its Civil War versions the longing became a defiant vow to stand and fight for the South.

The words