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Whistle the tune "Dixie,'' and in some corners of the South, you're in for a scrap.

For some, it's a heritage thing. For others, it's a racist thing. For Justin Robinson, a Gastonia native, it's simply a good thing.

No argument there. But Robinson is black, and you wouldn't think he'd like the widely accepted anthem of the Confederate South.

Robinson is a fiddle player. And he plays with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a trio of young black musicians who play the old-time string band music popular with Southern African Americans way before MTV.

Plus, he knows the musical history of "Dixie.'' And you can expect he and his band mates, Dom Flemons and Greensboro's Rhiannon Giddens, will talk about it this weekend when they perform at Shakori Hills just east of us in Chatham County.

Yep, American music isn't all ... black and white.

"It raises the eyebrows a little bit,'' Robinson, 25, says about the history of "Dixie.'' "But there are all sort of things like that in American history. What seems to be the truth is often not.''

A quick history lesson.

Some say a white Yankee songwriter named Dan Emmett wrote "Dixie.'' He even owns the copyright. But in all likelihood, in the 1850s, Emmett learned the tune from a black string band family he knew in Ohio.

And the person who wrote the tune, or at least preserved it, was a black woman.

Ellen Snowden, a former slave from Maryland, was given as a gift at age 10 to a white family who moved to Ohio in the 1820s.

She was the only person of color for miles, and she missed her family and her home.

So, she wrote - or remembered - a song about the land of cotton.

When she got older, Ellen taught the tune to her sons, Ben and Lew. In turn, she - or her sons - taught it to Emmett.

So, look away, Dixie Land. Who knew?

Now, I had heard this story from a musicologist and a Confederate historian. But they were white. And quite honestly, it really didn't bounce in my brain until I heard three black musicians make the tune their own.

And that is some kind of powerful.

Robinson plays "Dixie'' as an instrumental. It's on the group's latest recording, "Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind,'' and the way Robinson plays it, he gives it a winsome feel reminiscent of the back-porch South.

But the Drops don't play it in concert anymore. The trio uses "Dixie'' as a touchstone on stage to help introduce a new tune they play. They call it "Snowden's Jig,'' a tune written by Emmett more than a century ago.

Emmett originally called it "Genuine Negro Jig.'' But Emmett got that tune from, you guessed it, the Snowdens. Here's the big coincidence: The Snowdens lived right beside Emmett's grandparents in Mount Vernon, Ohio.

And how did the Drops know that? From one night in Ohio.

Last April, music historians Howard and Judy Sacks took an antique six-string banjo and a copy of their 1993 book when they went to see the Drops perform at an Ohio church.

Afterward, they took the trio to dinner, talked about their research and gave them a copy of their book, "Way Up North In Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem.''

The Sackses spent 12 years on a book sparked by a walk in a local graveyard. There, they saw a peculiar inscription on the tombstone of Ben and Lew Snowden that read: "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett.''

That's when they went door to door near the graveyard and met a family who took care of the Snowden family decades before. And there, in a living room, Howard and Judy Sacks struck gold.

They were shown what remained of the Snowden family and the legend of "Dixie'': a violin, two banjos, a scrapbook and a shoebox full of nearly 40 letters, written from 1836 to the 1920s.

The letters became the backbone of their book. As for the banjos, that's the other part of this story.

That night, at a small restaurant in Granville, Ohio, Robinson and his band mates held a homemade Snowden banjo that more than likely played "Genuine Negro Jig.''

And "Dixie,'' too.

That, they say, was magic.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com