a black person is that it was derived from barracoon, an enclosure for slaves in transit increasingly used in the years before American Civil War, but on the stage, "coon" could have been used earlier as a black character was named Raccoon in a 1767 colonial comic opera. "Zip Coon" was sung to the same tune as "Turkey in the Straw", and it was first performed by Bob Farrell, and popularized by George Washington Dixon in the 1830s. This version was first published between 1829 and 1834 in either New York or Baltimore. Dixon, and Bob Farrell and George Nicholls had separately claimed to have written the song, and the dispute has not been not resolved. Ohio songwriter Daniel Decatur Emmett is sometimes erroneously credited as the song's author. "Zip Coon" has a vocal range of an octave and a minor sixth. Both the verse and the chorus end on the tonic, and both begin a major third above the tonic. In the verse, the highest note is a fifth above the tonic and the lowest is a minor sixth below. In the chorus, the highest note is an octave above the last note, and the lowest is the last note itself. The song stays in key throughout. The song gave rise to the blackface minstrel show character Zip Coon. "Zip Coon" has many different lyrical versions. Thomas Birch published a version in 1834, while George Washington Dixon published a version called "Ole Zip Coon" with different lyrics circa 1835. Both Birch's and Dixon's versions keep the same chorus and the first four stanzas: Chorus Chorus Chorus In subsequent stanzas, both lyricists talk about events in the life of Andrew Jackson, Birch of President Jackson's battle with the Second Bank of the United States and Dixon of General Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. When the Mexican–American War began, Dixon published a new version of "Zip Coon" with updated lyrics pertaining to the war: The chorus "Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day" likely influenced the song "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" in Walt Disney's 1946 adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus tales, Song of the South. Another version of "Old Zip Coon" with new self-referencing lyrics by David K. Stevens (1860–1946) was published in the Boy Scout Song Book (1920). Stevens' lyrics contain no direct racial references other than the title of the song itself: "Nigger Love a Watermelon,