Piano Sheets > Dan Emmett Sheet Music > Dixie (ver. 1) Piano Sheet

Dixie (ver. 1) by Dan Emmett - Piano Sheets and Free Sheet Music

  
About the Song
"Dixie", also known as "I Wish I Was in Dixie", "Dixie's Land", and other titles, is a popular American song. It is one of the most distinctively American musical products of the 19th century, and probably the best-known song to have come out of blackface minstrelsy. Although not a folk song at its creation, "Dixie" has since entered the American folk vernacular. The song likely cemented the word "Dixie" in the American vocabulary as a synonym for the Southern United States. Most sources credit Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett with the song's composition; however many other people have claimed to have composed "Dixie", even during Emmett's lifetime. Compounding the problem of definitively establishing the song's authorship are Emmett's own confused accounts of its writing, and his tardiness in registering the song's copyright. The latest challenge has come on behalf of the Snowden Family of Knox.    Download this sheet!
About the Artist
Daniel Decatur "Dan" Emmett (October 29, 1815 – June 28, 1904) was an American songwriter and entertainer, founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition. Of Irish ancestry, he was born at Mount Vernon, Ohio, then a frontier region. After working as a printer's devil and serving in the United States Army, Emmett joined a circus troupe in 1835. In association with Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham, and Frank Brower, he organized the Virginia Minstrels, which made their first appearance before a paying audience at the Chatham Theatre in New York City in 1843. Although blackface performance, in which white men painted their hands and faces black and impersonated caricatures of black 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 are 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 performed the first true minstrel show: previous blackface acts.
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