Dan Emmett Writes “Dixie,” 1859

By Rachel Richardson Rachel Richardson

He started with the tune his mother had hummed

in Ohio, nostalgia he’d carried for years,

and by Sunday afternoon he had the words.

A triumph, already; he whistled the banjo’s part.

(Himself a sympathizer from the North,

called copperhead, called traitor by his own kin.)

Something lively, some git-up-and-git they’d wanted

and didn’t he deliver—

Miss Susan got seven encores the first night.

That gave them their tune, their Negro walk-around—

Look away, look away, look away, they sang.

Vipers, that spring, spread thick on the ground.

Source: Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011)

Biography

Poet Rachel Richardson was born and raised in Berkeley, California. She earned a BA at Dartmouth College, an MFA at the University of Michigan, and an MA in folklore at the University of North Carolina.

The author of the poetry collection Copperhead (2011), Richardson’s poetry investigates the disjunctions of remembered and recorded history. Discussing the overlap between her method of poetic composition and her graduate . . .

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