Daniel Decatur Emmett, a northerner from Ohio, wrote Dixie as a blackface "walk-around" song for the Bryant Minstrels show in New York City. (One theory holds that Emmett got the melody from Ben and Lew Snowden, African-American brothers born to slaves.) In the pre-war years, the jaunty march-like tune gained immediate popularity throughout the United States, and even earned the favor of Abraham Lincoln.

Honest Abe may have been disappointed to learn that the song became the Confederacy's unofficial anthem when it was played at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis in 1861. Consternation came from the South, as well; the later verses were criticized for their lack of dignity. Even a century and a half after the war, the song evokes regional pride among many Southerners, but to blacks and people outside the South (and some within it) it more often is associated with stereotypical Southern separatism, prejudice, and backwardness.

During the Civil War, Southerners rewrote the later verses in an attempt to make the piece more worthy as a national anthem, and Northerners created their own revisions in an effort to reclaim the song as their own. There are so many competing versions that only the first verse and chorus may be said to be standard today:



Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten,

Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.

In Dixie Land, where I was born in,

Early on one frosty mornin',

Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray!

In Dixie Land I'll take my stand

To live and die in Dixie.

Away, away, away down south in Dixie.

Away, away, away down south in Dixie.

© James Reel, Rovi