Chapter 2: American Popular Music in the Nineteenth Century Pt.1
Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815–1904) was a key figure in the development of blackface minstrelsy. A songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and performer, Emmett helped establish the minstrel show as a national phenomenon and wrote songs that became embedded in the American musical imagination. Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Emmett was largely self-taught. As a child, he learned to play the fiddle, and as a young man he apprenticed as a printer before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1834. While stationed at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, he became a skilled fife player and drummer, skills that would serve him well in his later musical career.
After his discharge in 1835, Emmett joined a circus in Cincinnati, where he began performing in blackface. Emmett wrote songs in exaggerated dialect and toured with various circus and minstrel troupes as a banjoist, singer, and comedian and in 1843, Emmett helped found the Virginia Minstrels.
Emmett spent the rest of his professional life in the minstrel theater, both as a performer and a songwriter. His most famous composition, “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” (1860), commonly known as “Dixie,” became one of the most recognizable and controversial songs of the 19th century. Though originally intended as a minstrel tune, it was quickly adopted by the Confederacy during the Civil War and became an unofficial Southern anthem. Emmett also composed “Turkey in the Straw” (1861), a fiddle tune that, while often divorced from its minstrel roots today, also originated in blackface performance.
Dozens of minstrel companies soon emerged across the country, reflecting the genre’s explosive growth and widespread appeal. The Ethiopian Serenaders another blackface troupe, performed at the White House in 1844 during the presidency of John Tyler. This rapid rise to national visibility, just four years after the first full-length minstrel show was performed, signaled the genre’s swift acceptance into mainstream American culture. Additional figures like E. P. Christy developed highly commercialized minstrel companies, and minstrelsy dominated American entertainment for decades, extending its influence across theaters, sheet music publishing, and even into the earliest forms of recorded music in the 20th century.