Probably Emmett began early to provide new tunes for them. He was the composer of 'Old Dan Tucker' and the 'Boatman's Dance,' of 'Walk Along, John,' and 'Early in the Morning,' and one walk-around which he devised in the late fifties for Bryant's Minstrels, 'Dixie,' was introduced by Mrs. John Wood into a burlesque, which she was playing in New Orleans, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The sentiment and the tune took the fancy of the ardent Louisianans, and they carried it with them into the Confederate army, where it soon established itself as the war-song of the South. And then when Richmond had fallen at last, Lincoln ordered the bands of the victorious army to play 'Dixie,' with the wise explanation that as we had captured the Southern capital, we had also captured the Southern song. And 'Dixie,' which had begun life so humbly as a walk-around in a minstrel-show in New York, bids fair to survive indefinitely as the musical testimony to the fact that the cruel war is over, and that these States are now one nation. II It was only a year or two after the quartet of Emmett, Brower, Whitlock, and Pelham had shown the possibilities of the new form of amusement that troops of negro minstrels began to supply an entire evening's amusement. The regulation First Part was devised with its curving row of vocalists, instrumentalists, and comedians. The dignified Interlocutor took his place in the middle of the semicircle, and uttered the time-honored phrase: "Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture." Bones captured the chair at one end, and Tambo pre-empted that on the other; and they began their wordy skirmish with the Middleman, in which that pompous presiding officer always got the worst of it. This device for immediate and boisterous laughter, this putting down of the Middleman by the End-man, the negro minstrels appear to have borrowed from the circus, where the clown is also permitted always to discomfit the stiff and stately ring-master.