Grumble, Tablet

Southern notables assembled last week at Fletcher, N. C., to sing a song and unveil a tablet to the song's author, Daniel Decatur Emmett, who, though he never took his stand or lived or died south of the Mason & Dixon line,* nevertheless composed both the words and music of "Dixie." Son of Ohio and buried there, Composer Emmett is the adopted son of all "Dixieland." Yet the scene last week in the cemetery of Calvary Episcopal Church at Fletcher ("outdoor Westminster Abbey of the South") was the first of their kind; the tablet, Composer Emmett's first in the South.

Composer Emmett never regarded "Dixie" as his ablest creation. He personally liked better his now-forgotten "Old Dan Tucker." Emmett, runaway son of a blacksmith, sang and banjoed in the country's earliest traveling minstrel quartets, barnstorming from hall to hall with striped calico shirts, ruffled sleeves, flaring collars. One Saturday night, on tour, his minstrel leader asked him to compose a new "walk around" (stage march) for use the next day. Emmett frowned at the hurry order, went to his hotel, rummaged out of his trunk the rough draft of a tune he had thought up some years before. The words for the tune had been suggested to him by a grumble he had often heard on the lips of circus performers "up North" when nippy autumn nights set in: "I wish - I was in Dixie's land." >>

To the original draft Minstrel Emmett put a few new touches, rhymed "cotton" and "forgotten," changed the tempo, handed his chief what he felt was a botched job. But next evening, the audience swayed to the new tune, caught the words easily, especially the "hoorays." It was one of those songs that people sing leaving the theatre. Soon the whole country sang it, echoing it into the end of last week.

* The boundary (Lat. 39" 43' 26.3" N.) between Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was surveyed in 1763-67 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon who were sent over from England to settle the dispute between the Baltimore and Penn families following Charles IPs grant to William Penn. When slavery became a U. S. issue, the Line was thought of as extending west via the Ohio River and the upper boundary of Missouri, separating free from slave states, North from South.