History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a History Knox piece that publishes each Saturday morning in Knox Pages
GAMBIER — I was delighted to hear from Dr. Howard Sacks at Kenyon College that a historical marker is being dedicated on Sunday, Aug. 18 at Morris Chapel Cemetery to the memory of the Snowden Family, the prominent African-American musicians who called Knox County home.
The public is invited to attend the 3 p.m. ceremony, and is advised to bring chairs.
The Snowdens’ music will be performed, and the event will be attended by Jeff Ward from the Ohio History Connection, Howard and Judith Sacks, who wrote the in-depth book Way Up North in Dixie, and descendants of the Snowdens who still live in north central Ohio.
Morris Chapel Cemetery is located at 15375 Hyatt Road (east of Old Mansfield Road), the cemetery where many members of the Snowden family are buried.
The Snowden legacy started with Tom and Ellen Snowden, who met, married, and settled down on a farm in Knox County before the Civil War. Tom was known to have been an entertainer, and a young man who often visited the farm next door to Tom in Clinton (now the northern edge of Mount Vernon) was Dan Emmett.
Emmett’s grandfather’s farm adjoined the Snowden farm, and it seems a relationship was first forged there between Emmett and the Snowden parents and
children.
The children, Sophia, Ben, Phebe, Martha, Lew, Elsie, and Annie, all became musicians to some degree or another involved with the band. They were known to sing, dance, and play, including fiddles, banjos, guitars, dulcimer, and flute, with tambourine, triangle, and bones for percussion.
They also kept up the family farm after their father Tom passed away, at the age of 53. Music was a key means by which they were able to integrate into Knox County’s predominately white society, and it proved a helpful way to raise funds that allowed Ellen to eventually pay off the farm’s mortgage.
When breaks in farm work allowed, the Snowdens would tour all over central Ohio, presenting shows in small towns, with tickets at 25 cents per person (15 cents for children).
They handed out flyers with testimonials from white citizens of Mount Vernon to vouch for them, a necessity during a time when a group of traveling blacks could be treated very poorly.
The Snowdens played many of the popular minstrel hits of the day — things like “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” while avoiding the racist tunes that demeaned and made fun of blacks. They also had original songs, but since they didn’t write them down, all but one has been lost.
That sole surviving song, “We’re Going to Leave Knox County” hasn’t been heard for 150 years, but a band of string players is going to present it at the Sunday ceremony. That’s a moving moment of history in its own right: Giving voice to some great musicians who were nearly forgotten.
The one controversy that had kept their name alive before Dr. Sacks’ work was the allegation that has occasionally surfaced stating a belief that the Snowdens had written the song “Dixie,” and that Dan Emmett stole it from them, and had a huge hit with it.
I’ll briefly recap what I’ve said about that before, in context of columns I’ve written about Emmett: The whole question fundamentally misunderstands the way folk musicians handled and “wrote” songs in the 1800s.
The truth is, very few new songs were completely new (the surviving Snowden song may be an exception to that rule, as the lyrics, at least, are distinctively shaped with details of their own lives).
But musical phrases in folk songs from the 1800s typically borrow from other, older tunes.
In some cases, pieces of popular melody can be traced back hundreds of years to English, Scottish, or Irish roots.
If we had written records of them, black blues and spirituals likely followed the same process of mixing-and-matching going all the way back to ancient Africa, for even in the early blues recordings from the 1920s, the same tune will show up under different names, sometimes with rewritten lyrics. “Dixie” is likely to be that sort of song.
My guess would be that the Snowdens, and others, had a hand in shaping “Dixie,” and Emmett did, too. His work on other songs demonstrates his genuine musical chops. And it’s not like he stole it and made a fortune with it:
No composers or performers made fortunes from songs in those days; only the publishers ranked in the bucks, and they weren’t required to pay royalties to the songwriters and arrangers. Performers had to use the popularity of a tune as a way to get gigs and play for their suppers.
Both Emmett and the Snowden family lived that life. I think the Snowdens should be acknowledged as shapers of Dan Emmett, shapers of American folk music culture, and very likely contributors to the piece of music that finally broke through as “Dixie.”
But it wasn’t a matter of stealing. With this kind of music, it’s something more along the lines of borrowing and repurposing, and everyone had a hand in it.
The Snowden Family Band was majorly influential and stands as a treasured part of Knox County history both for musical and social reasons.
I’m delighted to see that this historical marker is being placed at the cemetery where several of the family members are buried. And bringing voice to a song we knew they sang will be a moment that dissolves time itself.