Belles, beaux and brains of the 60's . Mrs. Annie Chambers Ketchum, of Mississippi,claimed the authorship of The Bonnie Blue Flag. The Southern press finally pushedthat claim, and Mr. A. wrote emphaticallythat his father had boughtthe original from the authorand published words andmusic unchanged. Emmett was the star ofBirch and Backus, as similar and equally futileclaim was made for Mobileas the cradle of Dixie butthat was made traveling vaudeville man-ager wrote a long and circum-stantial letter to the Reg-ister, giving the facts ofthe song having been writ-
Belles, beaux and brains of the 60's . Mrs. Annie Chambers Ketchum, of Mississippi,claimed the authorship of The Bonnie Blue Flag. The Southern press finally pushedthat claim, and Mr. A. wrote emphaticallythat his father had boughtthe original from the authorand published words andmusic unchanged. Emmett was the star ofBirch and Backus, as similar and equally futileclaim was made for Mobileas the cradle of Dixie butthat was made traveling vaudeville man-ager wrote a long and circum-stantial letter to the Reg-ister, giving the facts ofthe song having been writ-ten on the white wall of the old Mobile Theatre, byMr. E. J. Arnold. This was in 18G0. The writerdescribed the wild excitement and fervor of Dan Emmett,great with Song; and he stated that the curtain was aboutto rise and that Mr. Arnold had no paper. Write it any-where! Emmett cried—Write it on the wall! And theaged orchestra leader, then and there, wrote his modernDaniels cript. Like Sir Lucius OTriggers quarrel, the story above is. DANIEL DECATUR EMMETT BELLES, BEAUX AND BRAINS OF THE SIXTIES 357 very pretty as it stands. The troubles with it are thatthere is no E. J. Arnold a leader anywhere: that the Mo-bile Theatre was burned in January, 1859, and no otherwas built until 1865. Moreover, Mr. Herman C. Arnold—now seventy-three years old and leader of the MemphisLyceum, writes me that he never told the story abovequoted to anyone; that he never was at the Mobile The-atre, but at the New Montgomery Theatre, which openedwith Wilkes Booth as star, in 1860. Mr. Arnold was lead-er of that theatres orchestra; and he writes: Hearing Dan Emmett sing Dixie, I admired it very muchand wrote the score for band and orchestra and I playedit for the raising of the first three Confederate flags whichwere raised at the capitol at Montgomery and also at theinauguration of Jefferson Davis. It made such a sensationthat it became the war tune of the South. And this set-tles the Mobile origin.
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