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How Dixie got its name
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By
Hazelle Maria, Contributing editor
Friday,
10 November, 2006
The name Dixie referring to the southern states of America, has been traced to a song first performed in New York City in the 1850s by a songerwriter from Ohio, Dan Emmett.
Emmett performed a minstrel song in which he imitated the language of black slaves in the South: "Gib me de place called Dixie Land, wid hoe and shubble in my hand." That song passed into obscurity, but Dixie did not, thanks to another song Emmett wrote and first performed on April 4, 1859, also in New York City. This song took Dixie's Land as its subject and title, and contains the still familiar lines "In Dixie Land whar I was born in" and "I wish I was in Dixie."
Where Emmett got Dixie is unknown. It may derive from Mason and Dixon's Line, the name of the boundary separating North and South. Or it may come from "dix", the French word for "ten," which was printed on the back of ten-dollar bills issued by the Citizens' Bank of New Orleans. In any case, Emmett's song made Dixie the sentimental nickname for the South. Its tunefulness and Southern patriotism ("In Dixie land I'll take my stand to live and die in Dixie") were heard when Dixie's Land was played on the frosty morning of February 18, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, as Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy.
Four years and two months later the Confederacy surrendered not only its armies but also its song. "I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it," President Lincoln said on April 10, 1865. "I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave his opinion that it is our lawful prize. I ask the band to give us a good turn on it."
The Confederacy represented 13 states: 11 which seceded from the Union and the pro-secession factors in two more, Kentucky and Missouri.
South Carolina (1860), Mississippi (1861), Florida (1861), Alabama (1861), Georgia (1861), Louisiana (1861), Texas (1861), Virginia (1861),Arkansas (1861), Tennessee (1861), North Carolina (1861), Missouri (1861) and Kentucky (1861).
Although Dixie was not invented in Dixie, Dixieland was. It is the name for a style of jazz first heard in New Orleans in the 1920s.
(Taken from www.answers.com)
On the Lam 2006
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