Last year, when the Chicks dropped “Dixie” from their name, a stab was made, in The New Yorker, at confronting the original song’s history. But that stab missed, and if confrontation with history really is the important exercise such pieces always want to suggest it is, then it’s important not to miss—important to me, anyway, who has been mulling over “Dixie” and its ramifications for a long time. And before I mulled it over, I sang it, as every schoolchild in my day did, everywhere in the country.
The New Yorker piece, by Amanda Petrusich, fuzzed and garbled the song’s origins:
. . . Yet among historians, there is little ambiguity about what the word “Dixie” communicates. Its use as a doting nickname for the Confederacy was popularized by “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land,” a minstrel song published in 1860 and usually performed in blackface.
The song does seem to have been published in 1860, under that title, though it may have been composed as early as the 1840’s and put in a drawer; it seems to have been first performed in 1859. So it didn’t popularize a doting nickname for the Confederacy, which, because it wouldn’t come into existence until 1861, had no doting nicknames awaiting popularization that year. The confident “Yet among historians, there is little ambiguity. . . ”—that throat-clearing gravitas, prior to making an error—may be New Yorker house style, and it’s easy for me to blame this example on copyediting and fact-checking. All writers are loose and lazy and need to be pulled up short (a disastrous feature of this blog is that it’s unedited). Yet the error here by no means amounts to a technicality. In covering up the song’s real origins, it exemplifies the general misunderstanding of “Dixie,” and of the origins of American vernacular style as a whole.
The blackface minstrel show: that’s the all-important fact about “Dixie.” Quickly noted and then breezed past in the New Yorker article (it’s rushing to get to Irving Berlin in three sentences), blackface minstrelsy tells us something essential about the song’s authors and first performers, and something essential about the “doting” attitudes toward the South that the article misconstrues.
And here’s what the song’s origin in minstrelsy tells us. “Dixie,” not just originally unrelated to the Confederacy, which it precedes, is in no way rural-or-plantation Southern. It’s originally urban. It’s originally Northern. And that complicates and explains everything.
The article goes on to say that songs expressing nostalgia for the antebellum South “continued to appear throughout the first decades of the twentieth century.” What’s left out of that gallop through a misunderstood history is the one thing critical to the creation of our entire pop culture. Such songs didn’t “continue to appear,” as if here and there and sometimes. They overwhelmingly dominated. Songs sung by white men in blackface and black wigs, in a grotesquely clownish, denigrating mimicry and appropriation of black music and speech, ascribing to its black characters an unquenchable desire to return to a happy life of enslavement, in a beautiful South, from which they’ve been somehow painfully separated: that just was American show business, beginning as early as the 1840’s, in the Northern cities, where theater entrepreneurs and music publishers created and developed this seemingly inexhaustible entertainment goldmine.