Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 31, 2006



"Dixie" 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 and probably cemented the word "Dixie" in the American vocabulary as a synonym for the Southern United States. Most sources credit Daniel Decatur Emmett with the song's composition, although even during Emmett's lifetime, many other people have claimed to have composed "Dixie". The song originated in the blackface minstrel show of the 1850s and quickly grew famous across the United States. Its lyrics, written in a racist, exaggerated version of African American English Vernacular, tell the story of a freed black slave pining for the plantation of his birth. During the American Civil War, "Dixie" was adopted as an anthem of the Confederacy. Since the advent of the American Civil Rights Movement, many have identified the lyrics of the song with the iconography and ideology of the Old South. Today, "Dixie" is often considered offensive, and the act of singing it to be sympathetic to the concept of slavery in the American South. Its supporters, on the other hand, view it as a legitimate aspect of Southern culture and heritage. (more...)

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