Emmett [Emmit], Dan(iel Decatur)

(b Mount Vernon, OH, 29 Oct 1815; d Mount Vernon, 28 June 1904). American composer and minstrel performer. He had little formal education, but in early youth learned popular tunes from his musical mother and taught himself to play the fiddle. At the age of 13 he became an apprentice printer and in 1834 enlisted in the US Army. At Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, he became an expert fifer and drummer, publishing his own Fifer’s and Drummer’s Guide in 1862 in cooperation with George Brace. On receiving his discharge from the army on 8 July 1835 he joined a Cincinnati circus, for one member of which he wrote the words of his first ‘black song’ (to the tune of Gumbo Chaff). In 1840–42 he toured with the Angervine and other circuses as a blackface banjoist and singer.

In November 1842 Emmett and Frank Brower (1823–74), a blackface dancer and singer who was the first black impersonator to play the bones, formed a fiddle and bones duo in New York. From 6 February 1843 they performed at the Bowery Amphitheatre with Billy Whitlock on the banjo, and Dick (Richard Ward) Pelham (1815–76) on the tambourine, as the Virginia Minstrels (for illustration see Minstrelsy, American). In contrast with earlier black impersonators, these four presented an entire evening of imitation black music, dancing, anecdotes and oratory, advertised as ‘entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas’. After spectacular successes in New York and Boston, the Virginia Minstrels toured England, beginning with a performance at the Concert Rooms, Liverpool, on 21 May 1843. Emmett performed independently at Bolton, Lancashire, and then travelled with circuses before rejoining Pelham and Brower in Dublin on 22 April 1844. In September of the same year Emmett and Brower sailed for the USA; with two new members they began a New England tour at Salem, Massachusetts, on 23 October.

During the next 14 years Emmett had to counter growing competition from other minstrel groups. He gave his troupe such names as ‘Operatic Brothers and Sisters’ to add respectability, and inserted ‘wench’ numbers in which male dancers impersonated females to titillate jaded audiences. He wrote and acted in ‘Ethiopian Burlettas’ (musical farces) such as German Farmer, or The Barber Shop in an Uproar, and launched a genre called ‘machine poetry’ in which his semiliterate black characters pretentiously assumed the inventive and progressive qualities of the Industrial Age. In 1853 he became part-owner of Charles T. White’s Minstrels, and in 1855 opened the first minstrel hall in Chicago, at 104 Randolph Street. In November 1858 he disbanded his troupe and joined Dan Bryant’s Minstrels in New York, with whom he continued performing until the end of the 1861–2 season in Chicago. He wrote the tunes and words for the shows’ finales, called ‘walk-arounds’ (identified by Nathan as secular imitations of the black ‘shout’), played the banjo and other instruments, acted in comic skits and sang parodies of well-known serious artists.

Emmett’s most successful walk-around, now known as Dixie, was first published in an authorized version (1860) as I Wish I was in Dixie’s Land (see illustration); it had been pirated a month earlier in New Orleans by P.P. Werlein as I Wish I was in Dixie, with music credited to J.C. Viereck and words to W.H. Peters. It was first performed in New York at Mechanics Hall, Broadway, by Bryant’s entire cast on 4 April 1859, as the ‘plantation song and dance’ concluding part 3 of the show. In it Emmett imitated the black call-and-response pattern; the chorus answers the soloist in the verse with ‘Look away’ and in the refrain with ‘Hooray’.

Emmett lived in Chicago from 1867 to 1870 and from 1871 to 1888. At first he worked as a member of Haverly’s Minstrels, but after losing his voice he played the fiddle in various saloons. His rough-hewn black tunes and lyrics offended genteel society of the time and he was gradually forgotten. His poverty prompted younger minstrels to stage two benefits (1880 and 1882) that together brought him over $1000 and in 1881–2 enabled him to be employed as a fiddler in Leavitt’s Gigantean Minstrels. After a tour that was notably successful in the South because of Dixie, Emmett returned to Chicago, and in 1888 retired to Mount Vernon, Ohio. From 1893 to his death he was aided by a weekly allowance from the Actor’s Fund of America.

Between 1843 and 1865 Emmett published at least 30 songs, most of which are banjo tunes or walk-arounds, and between 1859 and 1869 he composed another 25 tunes which are still in manuscript at the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus. Collections published in 1843–4 contain 36 tunes sung by him, only six of which are securely attributable to him. His authenticated tunes, always in heavily accented duple meter and always in a major key, are matched with gnarled texts that never treat any downtrodden person in a kindly or dignified manner.

WORKS

Texts and tunes by Emmett; all printed works published in New York unless otherwise indicated. Catalogue in Nathan.

Collections: Old Dan Emmit’s Original Banjo Melodies (Boston, 1843–4)Emmit’s Celebrated Negro Melodies (London, c1844)

walk-arounds

other songs and tunes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.B. Galbreath: Daniel Decatur Emmett, Author of Dixie (Columbus, OH, 1904) [incl. list of walk-arounds, 1859–81]

H. Nathan: Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1962, 2/1977) [with catalogue of works, edn of some tunes]; reviews by D.J. Epstein, Notes, xx (1962–3), 53–64, and H.W. Hitchcock, MQ, xlix (1963), 391–3

C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)

C.B. Holmberg: ‘Toward the Rhetoric of Music: Dixie’, Southern Speech Communication Journal, li (1985), 71–82

H.L. and J.R. Sacks: Way up North in Dixie: a Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington DC, 1993)

ROBERT STEVENSON