Biography
Whereas Stephen Foster transformed nineteenth-century Ethiopian songs rooted in slave traditions into elevated artistic statements, Daniel Decatur Emmett embodied their raw, crowd-pleasing spirit. He entered professional entertainment in 1835 by signing on with a Cincinnati circus as a banjoist and fiddler. By 1843 he had helped establish the Virginia Minstrels in New York; the troupe quickly dominated stages along the Eastern Seaboard and sailed to the British Isles the following year. While in Boston in 1844, Emmett issued the songbook Old Dan Emmit’s Original Banjo Melodies, a set of pieces he partly wrote and may partly have gathered from other sources. The tune Bluetail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn) made its debut in those pages, although Emmett’s authorship remains unconfirmed.
He moved among several companies, releasing the successful number Jordan Is a Hard Road to Travel in 1853 and inaugurating Chicago’s first dedicated minstrel theater in 1855. Two years later he joined Charles Bryant’s Minstrels in New York. Emmett specialized in the walk-around, the closing dance routine that summoned the entire ensemble. One such piece, introduced in New York on 4 April 1859 under the title I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land, soon became universally known as Dixie and served as the Confederacy’s unofficial anthem throughout the Civil War—an outcome that must have struck Emmett as ironic, given that his wartime compositions aligned him with the Northern cause.
After the conflict he resettled in Chicago, yet the plantation-style songs that had defined his career lost favor, displaced by sentimental parlor ballads, European-derived dances, and eventually ragtime. When he lost his voice in the 1870s he left the minstrel stage. From then until his death at age eighty-eight in 1904 he lived chiefly on charitable support and a small pension arranged by the Actor’s Fund of America. Despite Dixie’s vast circulation, Emmett received no royalties from the millions of copies of sheet music sold during his lifetime. He composed roughly one hundred works, yet by twenty-first-century measures nearly all of them remain steeped in the racial prejudices of the minstrel era. Even so, Daniel Decatur Emmett stands as a central architect of American popular music before the Civil War.
He moved among several companies, releasing the successful number Jordan Is a Hard Road to Travel in 1853 and inaugurating Chicago’s first dedicated minstrel theater in 1855. Two years later he joined Charles Bryant’s Minstrels in New York. Emmett specialized in the walk-around, the closing dance routine that summoned the entire ensemble. One such piece, introduced in New York on 4 April 1859 under the title I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land, soon became universally known as Dixie and served as the Confederacy’s unofficial anthem throughout the Civil War—an outcome that must have struck Emmett as ironic, given that his wartime compositions aligned him with the Northern cause.
After the conflict he resettled in Chicago, yet the plantation-style songs that had defined his career lost favor, displaced by sentimental parlor ballads, European-derived dances, and eventually ragtime. When he lost his voice in the 1870s he left the minstrel stage. From then until his death at age eighty-eight in 1904 he lived chiefly on charitable support and a small pension arranged by the Actor’s Fund of America. Despite Dixie’s vast circulation, Emmett received no royalties from the millions of copies of sheet music sold during his lifetime. He composed roughly one hundred works, yet by twenty-first-century measures nearly all of them remain steeped in the racial prejudices of the minstrel era. Even so, Daniel Decatur Emmett stands as a central architect of American popular music before the Civil War.