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Daniel Decatur Emmett (October 29, 1815June 28, 1904) was an American composer, entertainer, and founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition, the Virginia Minstrels. The Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford University Press 1955 (Percy A. Scholes, ed.) He is most remembered as the composer of the song "Dixie".
His grandfather, Rev. John Emmett (1759–1847), had been born in Cecil County, Maryland, and after serving as a private in the American Revolutionary War and fighting at the Battle of White Plains in New York and later in Delaware, became a Methodist minister in the then-vast frontier of Augusta County, Virginia, and then moved across the Appalachian Mountains to Licking County, Ohio and also served in the Ohio legislature representing Pickaway County, Ohio in the Scioto River valley.
His father, Abraham Emmett (1791–1846), served as a private in the War of 1812 while his father served in the Ohio legislature.
Notwithstanding his grandfather's career, Dan had little formal education. He learned popular tunes from his musical mother, and taught himself to play the fiddle.
At age 13, Emmett became apprenticed to a printer and in 1836, when he was 21, enlisted in the United States Army.U.S. Army Register of enlistments p. 267 of 440 available at ancestry.com He became an expert fifer and drummer at Newport Barracks, Newport, Kentucky.
Emmett was a Catholic Church. He married Catharine Rives in 1853 in New York City, and they remained together until her death in 1875. Four years later, Emmett married Mary Bird (or Browner) in Chicago, Illinois; Emmett did not have children.Cook County register of marriages available on ancestry.com
Although blackface performance, in which white men painted their faces and hands black and impersonated caricatures of African-American men and women, was already an established performance mode at that time—Thomas D. Rice had created the character of Jim Crow nearly a decade earlier, and blackface had been widely popular ever since—Emmett's group is said to be the first to "black up" an entire band rather than one or two performers. The group's full-length blackface performance is generally considered to have been the first true minstrel show: previous blackface acts were usually either an entr'acte for a play or one of many acts in a comic variety show.
Emmett is traditionally credited with writing the song "Dixie". The story that he related about its composition varied each time he told it, but the main points were that he composed the song in New York City while a member of Bryant's Minstrels. The song was first performed by Emmett and the Bryants at Mechanics' Hall in New York City on April 4, 1859. The song became a runaway hit, especially in the South, and it was the piece for which Emmett was best known. Emmett himself reportedly told a fellow minstrel: "If I had known to what use they Southerners were going to put my song, I will be damned if I'd have written it."Letter from Col. T. Allston Brown to T.C. De Leon. Published in De Leon, Belles, Beaux, and Brains and quoted in Nathan 275. After the South began using his song as a rallying call, Emmett wrote the fife-and-drum manual for the Union Army. In 1862, Emmett published his own Fifer's and Drummer's Guide in cooperation with George G. Bruce. Emmett's song was a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln, who said after the war ended in 1865, "I have always thought that 'Dixie' was one of the best tunes I ever heard... I insisted yesterday that we had fairly captured it."Speech given on April 10, 1865 and quoted in Hall 10.
Another writer named William Shakespeare Hays (1837–1907) (pen name: Will S. Hays) claimed to be the song's true author.Abel, E. Lawrence (2000). Singing the New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy, 1861–1865. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, p. 47. Members of the Snowden Family, well known to Emmett in his Knox County youth, have also been named as writers of the song, namely John Baptist Snowden, a freed slave.Sacks, Howard L. and Sacks, Judith Rose (1993). Way up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, p. 3.
Numerous schools, businesses, and other institutions in Mount Vernon, Ohio, are named after Emmett. The official memorial to him is a large boulder with a placard attached located in front of the Knox County Historical Museum.
Emmett published at least 30 songs between 1843 and 1865, most of which are banjo tunes or . Between 1859 and 1869, he composed another 25 tunes that are in manuscript at the State Library of Ohio in Columbus, Ohio.
He appears in Percival Everett's 2024 novel James.
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