The Confederacy's National Anthem.

It was warm last Friday. Rusty called me after work and told me to get ready to go to Kenyon College.
We had previously discussed driving to Kenyon in our work clothes, in my farm truck. The plan also included buying a six pack and sitting on lawn chairs in the bed and gawking at the coeds. But my truck is currently fuel-tankless. Cars aren't made for gawking. So we took showers and put on not poopy clothes. Which was okay too, cause Gambier is the only place within 50 miles with a decent art gallery, decent coffee shop, decent bookstore, and decent girls.
Dan Emmett is from Mount Vernon, Ohio. And you ask, "Who the hell is Dan Emmett?" because you are no patriot. He was the first blackface minstrel. He fell into the ashes of a cork tree fire and was stuck with a beautiful thought. And he wrote Dixie. You know, "“Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land." Every year we commemorate his wonderfully productive life and forward thinkingness with the Dan Emmett Music & Arts Festival. Complete with little silhouette minstrel logo. Mount Vernonians are really known to class a joint up.

Ben and Lou

Several years ago the Snowden Family claimed that they were in fact the authors of Dixie and that Emmett was a sham. So a professor at Kenyon looked into it. Wrote a book entitled Way Up North In Dixie. The book describes Knox County in the late 1850s. The author came to the conclusion that, while there is no proof, it is more than likely the Snowdens (who were quite black and very recently not slaves) penned Dixie. Which makes sense if you note that the song tells the satirical tale of an ex-slave living up north and pining for his previous life living it up on a plantation.

Rusty picked up the book and started leafing through it, giggling, as he is wont to do. Showed it to me. I flipped through it and noticed that there was a town on the map that no longer exists. Then I saw a passage that claimed that there was a marker on the grave of the two Snowden brothers who were reputedly the ones to teach the song to Dan. And that the grave was located in a graveyard next to a clapboard church, three miles north of Dan Emmett's own grave. Now, everyone in Mount Vernon knows where Emmett'’s gave is. And five miles north of Emmett's gave is, my farm. But I couldn'’t think of any graveyards or churches between town and my place.

We, of course, had to see the gravestone, because it purported to claim ownership of Dixie on the stone itself. We drove the three miles north from Emmett. And came to the middle of no graveyard. I pulled into the nearest neighbor's drive and asked there if there were any old graveyards in the vicinty. And there was indeed. Right next to an old church. One turn and mile later we found it. After twnety minutes of trying to dicipher age old gravestones we found it.
The proof was ours. Everybody knows graves don'’t lie.