Old Dan Tucker - 2nd South Carolina String Band
Historic Music
•
6m 26s
In America of the early 1800s, nonsense songs were frequently written about larger than life characters. This tune, written by Dan Emmett and published in 1843 by Charles Keith Company of Boston, Mass. is a great example. The song was popularized by Emmett’s band, the “Virginia Minstrels,” and is one of the most frequently found tunes in minstrel playbills from 1843 to 1847.
Emmett was born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, then America’s frontier, in 1815. He evidently inherited his musical abilities from his mother, teaching himself to play violin, fife and drum at an early age. On the Fourth of July, in his fifteenth year, he performed his first composition, “Old Dan Tucker”, on the Mt. Vernon village green. Legend has it that he named ‘Old Dan’ after his dog, “Tucker.”
Twenty eight years after its first publication, “Old Dan Tucker” was still in print from seven different publishers. Today this song’s popularity continues and it has become a standard of country and bluegrass music.
Up Next in Historic Music
-
Deems Taylor: Through the Looking Gla...
A charming extended piece of music (about 30 minutes) by an American composer who is seldom heard nowadays, but whose music was highly popular in the 1920s and is well worth hearing now. Deems Taylor was almost a household name in those days, being prominently seen and heard in magazines and on r...
-
The Flying Dutchman- Overture
Willem Mengelberg and the New York Philharmonic, 1925.
An early electric recording of this famous overture by an old-school Wagnerian conductor. It’s a good example of the late nineteenth-century approach to this music, all storm and melodrama. Mengelberg was regarded in his day as one of the gre... -
John Brown's March - Far, Far from Home
