Premiere of "Dixie"
On the evening of April 4, 1859, Bryant’s Minstrels introduced a new walkaround number at Mechanics’ Hall in New York City. The song, written by Daniel Decatur Emmett, opened with the line “I wish I was in the land of cotton” and would become one of the most widely known songs in American history. According to Emmett, Jerry Bryant had asked him for a new piece by the following Monday, and he wrote it in a single evening in his New York apartment.
“Dixie” spread with extraordinary speed. Before the Civil War it was a popular novelty song enjoyed across the country. Once Southern states began seceding, it was adopted as an unofficial Confederate anthem, played at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration in February 1861. Emmett himself, a Northerner from Ohio, was reportedly dismayed by the association. Soldiers on both sides wrote endless parodies throughout the war.
In England the tune was equally infectious. By 1861 the London music hall comedian Frank Hall had adapted it as “In the Strand,” a bawdy comic song about street life in Victorian London. Sailors took to the melody on both counts: the original “Dixie” tune went to sea in its own right, and shipboard parodies multiplied alongside it. Hall’s version crossed the water and found a second life as the capstan shanty I Wish I Was With Nancy (collected by Cecil Sharp from Watchet sailor John Short in 1914), its words thoroughly reshaped for the fo’c’sle.