Yes, that “Dixie.” Alas, the first pop music stars from the Lower East Side were blackface minstrels. For all that minstrels went on about plantation life and their old Kentucky home, minstrelsy was in fact largely a northern, urban phenomenon that came out of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, where poor whites and poor blacks lived crowded together and borrowed bits of each other’s music and dance.



The Elvis of early minstrelsy, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, was a son of Irish immigrants from the neighborhood’s infamous Five Points slum. His signature song, “Jump Jim Crow,” was a hit all over the world. One traveler claimed to have heard it in Delhi.

Daniel Decatur Emmett, a successor to Rice, said that he wrote “Dixie” one dreary night on the Bowery in 1859. Although Southerners quickly claimed it as a Confederate anthem, it was just as big a hit in the North, sung not only at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration but on the train carrying Lincoln to his.

“I’m Waiting for the Man,” Velvet Underground, 1965