Dixie: Dan Emmett, the Snowden Family Claim and Lincoln's Captured Tune

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Dixie, the song most tied to the Confederacy, was copyrighted in 1860 by Dan Emmett, an Ohio-born white performer writing for Bryant's Minstrels in New York City. This episode examines Emmett's shifting accounts of writing it, the nearly 40 people who later claimed authorship, and the tradition that the Snowden Family Band, Black musicians from the Mount Vernon, Ohio area, originated the melody. It describes the walk around performance style, the song's Irish and Scottish folk roots in duple meter, and lyrics in exaggerated dialect that voiced a freed person longing for the plantation, in step with the positive good defense of slavery.

A New Orleans performance in 1860 drew seven encores, and in February 1861 a band played Dixie at Jefferson Davis's inauguration. Confederate writers tried to give it Southern origins, Albert Pike wrote militant lyrics, and Union writers answered with their own verses to the same tune. After Lee's surrender in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln asked a band at the White House to play it, saying the Union had fairly captured it. The episode follows the song into Gone with the Wind and The Dukes of Hazzard, civil rights era protests, and bans at the University of Miami in 1968 and Ole Miss in 2016.

• Emmett variously said he wrote it on a weekend deadline, on a rainy day thinking of his circus travels, and years before moving to New York.
• Minstrel troupes routinely absorbed folk tunes and melodies from other performers, which blurred authorship.
• Lincoln used the song in his 1860 presidential campaign.
• White opponents of integration sang Dixie to drown out civil rights marchers singing We Shall Overcome.
• In 2021, Sherman posting revived Union parody lyrics of Dixie online to mock neo-Confederates.