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Since 1859, when blackface minstrel Dan Emmett first sang "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land" before a New York City audience, the song has stirred powerful emotions on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Embraced as the anthem of the Confederacy, "Dixie" still epitomizes Southern pride for some, white supremacy and racism for others.
In Way Up North in Dixie, Howard Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks trace the song to a nineteenth-century black family on the Ohio frontier and tell how the words, verse for verse, speak of African American experiences in the North and a black woman's memories of her life in the slaveholding South. As the Sackses reveal, African Americans in Knox County, Ohio - the home of Dan Emmett, who claimed to have written "Dixie" - have long asserted that Emmett learned the song from a local black family of musicians, the Snowdens. Drawing on family records, public documents, and the vivid memories of elders in the community, the Sackses follow the Snowdens from Maryland slavery to Ohio freedom, reconstructing a story that is complex, discordant, and ultimately as memorable as "Dixie" itself.
Farmers by occupation, the Snowdens performed banjo and fiddle tunes and sang popular songs for black and white audiences throughout rural central Ohio from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. Linking the Snowdens to Dan Emmett, the Sackses focus on a central issue of American music from minstrelsy to the present: the appropriation and stereotyping of black culture by white entertainers. In a ground-breaking approach to the study of minstrelsy's origins, the authors document actual musical exchanges between African Americans and European Americans, revealing relationships long speculated about but rarely confirmed.
By documenting the black voice in "Dixie," the Sackses challenge contemporary Americans to rethink the anthem of the Old South as a symbol meaningful for a diverse society.
