[Dixielandjazz] Kash's question about the song "Dixie"

[Bobolink7736 at aol.com]

Hey, folks, I found the article about "Dixie" that I had wanted to send to 
the list but lost.  Here it is:

'Dixie' now too symbolic of old South, not of origins 
 
Friday, September 04, 1998
By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer <storysumm>


      The song "Dixie" has become identified with significant aspects of 
American history.

         Unfortunately, say several black musicologists, it's for all the 
wrong reasons.

         Because "Dixie" is now synonymous with slavery, racism and hatred, 
the music historians say, it was wise for the Woodland Hills School District 
to postpone this week's scheduled marching band performance of a Civil War 
program that included the song.

         Still, Woodland Hills plans to hold the concert Wednesday, and has 
no plans for now to delete "Dixie" from the program, which includes several 
songs representing the Union and Confederacy.

         But musicologist Josephine Wright made it clear that in her opinion, 
"Dixie" should be dropped.

         "There're too many symbols attached to that song and you can't strip 
them away," said Wright, a professor of music and black studies at the 
College of Wooster in Ohio. "It's a symbol of the old South. I don't know how 
you can clean up 'Dixie."'

         It would take quite a rehabilitation.

         Originally written by an Ohioan in 1859 for use in a traveling 
minstrel show, it became the anthem of the Confederacy and was played at the 
inaugural of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In the years since, it 
has assumed a life of its own, associated with stereotypes of a conservative, 
racist white South.

         "In all honesty, music is not independent of its culture," said 
Horace Clarence Boyer, a black professor of music theory and African-American 
music at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "The white people took 
it and used it to mean something."

         Some songs have a broad acceptance, Boyer said, but "Dixie" isn't 
one of them.

         "You don't have to explain why you're playing 'The Star-Spangled 
Banner.' You don't have to explain why you're playing 'America the 
Beautiful.' It has to be explained why somebody is playing 'Dixie' -- unless 
it's the Ku Klux Klan."


    

Song could be explained


         Boyer noted, however, that he personally feels Woodland Hills High 
School could still have a performance that included "Dixie," but only if it 
carefully told the audience ahead of time the reasons for the song's use.

         When Boyer was a U.S. Army recruit at Fort Jackson, S.C., he 
recalled that tradition called for the army band to strike up "Dixie" when 
the base's general made his first appearance.

         "I had to think for a moment about whether I would stand and 
salute," Boyer said, "because I was offended."

         Marva Carter, a black assistant professor of music history and 
literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said that if it were 
possible to separate "Dixie" from its politicized associations, "it's not a 
bad song."

         But whenever ethnic groups protest the playing of types of music, 
Carter said, "usually we're talking about music that's politicized and 
(produces) emotional reactions."

         For example, she said, during the late 1860s and the following 
decade, blacks didn't want to hear Negro spirituals because of the music's 
connection to the period of slavery.

         More recently, Jews have protested the playing of music by German 
composer Richard Wagner, whose operas were co-opted by the Nazis. In fact, 
only this year did the Israeli government allow Wagner's works to be played 
publicly in that country.

         The irony about "Dixie" is that the five-verse song was written by a 
Northerner with little interest in politics, and whose parents were strict 
abolitionists.

         Daniel Decatur Emmett was living in New York City in 1859 writing 
songs for a minstrel troupe. The Mount Vernon, Ohio, native composed hundreds 
of other songs, including "Old Dan Tucker," but none of his other melodies 
packed the same punch as "Dixie."

         The song, like many minstrel show tunes, was critical of authority. 
It speaks of the white plantation master, "Will the Weaver," taking a black 
slave named "Old Missus," who then dies. As the fourth verse warns: "Now 
here's a health to the next old missus ... "

         But most Southerners disregarded the final four verses and 
concentrated on the first one, which is what most people today are familiar 
with: "I wish I was in the land of cotton/Old times there are not 
forgotten/Look away, look away, look away, Dixie's Land."

         "The first verse made it a Southern anthem," said Jon Finson, a 
white professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
and an adjunct professor of American studies. But when the song was written, 
he said, "it was not particularly Southern."

         The minstrel show has been called the first distinct American 
music-theater genre. Whites wore blackface and entertained their audiences 
with crude depictions of black life and music, usually using "black-face 
dialect." Begun in the early 1840s, the shows continued to be popular into 
the 1930s.


    

Foster contributed


         Pittsburgh's Stephen Foster, a contemporary of Emmett, wrote several 
songs in this genre. The two probably never met, said Deane L. Root, director 
of the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Root said 
Foster wrote 23 minstrel songs, a small percentage of his 286 compositions.

         "Minstrel shows were in their era what television is today," said 
Root. "They were the most widely available form of popular entertainment. 
Every town had shows."

         Emmett was skilled at playing the fife, violin and flute. He wrote 
"Dixie" in a single day, a cold wet Sunday in New York City. Some say the 
line "I wish I was in Dixie" may have come from Emmett's wife, who hated the 
gray Northern winters.

         Historians of music and American culture still debate where the word 
"Dixie" came from.

         Some say it began in Louisiana, where a bank once printed $10 bills 
with the French word for 10 -- dix, pronounced "deez" -- on them. But legend 
says locals mauled the foreign pronunciation and began calling Louisiana 
"Dix's Land" and later "Dixie," before the term came to describe the entire 
South.

         Another theory is that Dixie referred to stories about a kind slave 
owner named Dixie or Dixy. "Dixie's Land" became a term for any comfortable 
place to live in the South.

         Webster's New World Dictionary attributes it to the name of a Negro 
character in a minstrel play.

         Whatever the origin of the word, the song brought Emmett such fame 
that even today his hometown produces an annual Dan Emmett Music and Arts 
Festival. (Knox County, where Mount Vernon is located, also claims William 
Donner, who gained notoriety as a cannibal when his ill-fated expedition was 
trapped during the 1846-1847 winter in a Sierra Nevada mountain pass; TV 
actor Paul Lynde; and 19th-century women's rights activist Victoria Woodhull, 
the first woman to run for president.)

         One last word:

         There are long-standing rumors that Emmett actually may have 
acquired "Dixie" from brothers Ben and Lew Snowden, members of a black family 
that moved to Mount Vernon from Virginia. Although a recent book called "Way 
Up North in Dixie" makes this claim, the Knox County Historical Society has 
checked census records and found that Ben and Lew would have been just 5 or 6 
years old at the time.

         Nevertheless, a local fraternal lodge put a marker on the Snowden 
brothers' gravesites in the 1940s that reads: "The men who taught Dan Dixie." 
 xxxxEnd.

         Right on, you lovers of great music!!!

Bob Lynn
bobolink7736 at aol.com 
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