Daniel Decatur Emmett

Daniel Decatur "Dan" Emmett (October 29, 1815 - June 28, 1904) was an American songwriter and entertainer, founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition.

Of Irish ancestry, he was born at Mount Vernon, Ohio, then a frontier region.

Growing up with little formal education, he learned popular tunes from his musical mother, and self taught himself to play the fiddle. At age 13, he became an apprentice printer and enlisted in the United States Army. He became an expert fifer and drummer at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and published his own Fifer’s and Drummer’s Guide in 1862 in cooperation with George G. Bruce. After receiving his discharge from the army on July 8th, 1835, he joined a Cincinnati circus. In 1840-1842 he toured with Angervine and other circuses as a black face banjoist and singer.

In association with Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham, and Frank Brower, he organized the Virginia Minstrels, which made their first appearance before a paying audience at the Chatham Theatre in New York City in 1843.

Although blackface performance, in which white men painted their hands and faces black and impersonated caricatures of black men and women, was already an established performance mode at that time—Thomas D. Rice had created the character of Jim Crow nearly a decade earlier, and blackface had been widely popular ever since—Emmett's group are said to be the first to "black up" an entire band rather than one or two performers. The group's full-length blackface performance is generally considered to have been the first true minstrel show: previous blackface acts were usually either an entr'acte for a play or one of many acts in a comic variety show.

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