We are goin to leave knox County To lands We Nevre Sean With nothing But our violins To make the music ring fare Well knox conty fare Well fore a Whyle fare well knox conty Dear an friends that on ous Smile Still, a Mount Vernon, Ohio, tradition credits the Snowdens with at least one other well-known work: "Dixie". The story, now in its third generation, dates to the 1910s or 1920s. It even prompted the local black American Legion post to place a new grave marker on Ben and Lew Snowden's final resting site in 1976, reading, "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett." Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks propose that the writers of "Dixie" were not Ben and Lew Snowden but their parents, Thomas and Ellen Snowden. The idea also appears in a 1978 genealogy of the Greer family of Ohio, which states that "After the Greers had settled in Knox Co., Ellen [Cooper] stayed with them until she married Tom Snowden, an entertainer whose musical gifts inspired Daniel Emmett to write 'Dixie.'" The Snowdens made little distinction between music they wrote and music they played, so the idea that they might have collaborated or even given a song to Dan Emmett is therefore not surprising. Evidence does place Emmett where he might have encountered, or even played with, the Snowdens: His grandparents' farm neighbored the Snowdens', his father may have shoed the Snowdens' horses, and his birthplace later became the Snowdens' church. An unpublished biography, written in 1935 by a friend of Emmett's family, places him in Mt. Vernon several times beginning in 1835 and into the 1860s. Furthermore, Ben and Lew Snowden had at least some connection to Emmett. On his death in 1923, one of Lew Snowden's boxes contained a newspaper clipping that named Emmett as composer of "Dixie" and a framed picture of Emmett with "Author of 'Dixie!'" written across it. Nevertheless, this evidence is, in the end, merely circumstantial. Many scholars, such as E. Lawrence Abel, reject the whole notion of a Snowden connection to "Dixie". Family life Thomas Snowden, a freed slave, and Ellen Cooper, a house servant, met and married in Knox County. They had nine children, of whom seven survived infancy. Although Thomas and Ellen Snowden were both illiterate, the children attended white schools and learned to read and write. The Snowdens were primarily farmers by trade, with their