Today we mark the 1815 birth of Daniel Decatur Emmett. The son of a blacksmith, Emmet went on to become a musician who, together with three colleagues, established what historians consider to be either the first or the second minstrel show troupe in 1843. Sixteen years later, in 1859, Emmett composed a walk-around—music for a flashy show number in which all the performers dance around the stage at one time—that is still well-known today, long after the heyday of minstrel shows. Let's take a look at terms associated with today's birthday boy.

Walk-around first appeared in print during the nineteenth century, but minstrel is a much older term. Hundreds of years before it was applied to performers in blackface giving a program of black American melodies, jokes, and impersonations, minstrel was used to refer to medieval singers, to musicians in general, and to poets.

Have you guessed the name of the walk-around composed by the minstrel Dan Emmett? It was "Dixie," later to become the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy and then of the U.S. South. Why did Emmett name his tune "Dixie"? We're not entirely certain, but it has been suggested that "Dixie" was the name of a stock black character in minstrel shows. If this was the case, then "Dixie's Land" would make sense as a showman's stock name for the South, the home (if plantation servitude can be called a home) of most American blacks of this era.