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"Seely Simpkins' Jig" is similar to
"Running through the Rain to Keep Your Hair Dry".
It is a fife tune composed by blackface minstrel Dan Emmett, printed in Bruce and Emmett's The Drummers and Fifers Guide and later in Dan Emmett’s own Fife Instructor (1880). It was entered as No. 48 in Dan Emmett's music manuscript book. It was named for Knox County, Ohio’s first fiddler. Simpkins, born in 1799, was a man who reportedly "frequented race tracks, and drew crowds and supplied hoe-downs on demand". In Hans Nathan's Dan Emmett and Negro Minstrelsy (1962), he writes: Mount Vernon (Ohio, birthplace of Dan Emmett) counted a highly unconventional, droll character among its citizens — Seeley Simpkins. Dan must have known him and been impressed by his antics, because he set him a "monument" many years later, by naming after him one of the tunes in his Fife Instructor.Simpkins' home was adjacent to another pioneering resident, Thomas Snowdon, an ex-slave who had followed his former master to Mount Vernon and both were north of the Emmett homestead. Snowdon was a master whistler and is known to have been the inspiration (if not the composer) of Emmett's famous song "Dixie". |