1815–1904 · United States · Romantic
Dan Emmett (1815–1904) was an American composer and entertainer who founded the Virginia Minstrels. He is best known for the song "Dixie". Born in Ohio, he had little formal education and taught himself the fiddle. The site has his piece Oh! Boatman, Haste! for choir.
In 1815 Dan Emmett came into the world at Mount Vernon, Ohio, which was then a frontier region.
John Emmett (1759–1847), Emmett's grandfather, was born in Cecil County, Maryland. He was a private in the Revolutionary War and fought at White Plains, New York, and afterwards in Delaware. He then became a Methodist preacher in Augusta County, Virginia, crossed the Appalachians into Licking County, Ohio, and sat in the Ohio legislature for Pickaway County. Emmett's father, Abraham Emmett (1791–1846), was an enlisted soldier in the War of 1812.
Despite his grandfather's career, Dan received little formal education. He learned tunes from his musical mother, and the fiddle he taught himself.
At 13 Emmett was apprenticed to a printer. When he was 21 he enlisted in the US Army and grew into a skilled fifer and drummer, stationed at Newport, Kentucky.
After the army, Emmett joined a circus in Cincinnati. In 1840–1842 he toured with the Angevine circus and others as a banjoist and singer in blackface, at a time when white performers blackened their faces and hands.
Alongside Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham and Frank Brower, Emmett formed the Virginia Minstrels. Their first show for a paying audience took place in 1843 at New York's Chatham Theatre.
Blackface performance already existed: Thomas D. Rice had created the Jim Crow character nearly ten years earlier. But Emmett's group is said to have been the first to put a whole ensemble on stage that way, rather than one or two performers. Its full-length show is generally regarded as the first true minstrel show, whereas earlier acts were either an interlude in a play or one number among many in a variety programme.
Emmett is generally credited with the song "Dixie". His account of how it came about changed with each telling, but the core of it stayed the same: he wrote it in New York City while performing with Bryant's Minstrels. Emmett and the Bryants first performed it on 4 April 1859 at Mechanics' Hall in New York. It quickly became a hit, especially in the South, and brought Emmett his greatest fame.
Once the South began using the song as a rallying call, Emmett wrote a fife-and-drum manual for the Union Army. In 1862 he published his own Fifer's and Drummer's Guide with George G. Bruce. President Abraham Lincoln was fond of the song. Others also laid claim to "Dixie": the writer William Shakespeare Hays (1837–1907) said he was its real author, and members of the Snowden family, whom Emmett knew well from his youth in Knox County, have been named too, among them John Baptist Snowden, a freed slave.
Emmett was a Catholic. In 1853 he married Catharine Rives in New York City; the marriage lasted until she died in 1875. Four years later he married again, in Chicago. Emmett had no children.
Following a tour that went especially well in the South, Emmett returned in 1888 to his native town of Mount Vernon and died there on 28 June 1904 at the age of 88. From 1893 he was supported by a weekly payment from the Actors Fund of America. In 1970 he entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in 1943 a musical film about him, Dixie, appeared, with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in the lead roles; the director was A. Edward Sutherland. His official memorial is a big boulder with a plaque outside the Knox County Historical Museum, and many schools, firms and other institutions in Mount Vernon are named after him.
Between 1843 and 1865 Emmett had at least 30 songs published, mostly banjo tunes or walkarounds. Another 25 tunes, written in 1859–1869, are kept in manuscript at the Ohio State Library in Columbus. His best-known piece is "Dixie".
For players, the site has Emmett's piece Oh! Boatman, Haste! for choir, at the advanced level.