Thank you to Greg for alerting me to this discussion and group of people concerned with music history.

Michael: Nathan is of value, but he also never laid a foot on Emmett's home turf and did all his work from secondary sources. He was much in need of updating. He would never have known, for example, that Emmett's song titles mentioned specific people and locations in Knox County, Ohio...and so on.
Lighter, in short: the book tells this story in great detail, so interested parties are welcome to look into it further. We know that some readers are not persuaded concerning thecommunity's (and our own) take on "Dixie's" origins, and so be it. There are facts in the world, but scholars and readers have the job of interpreting facts and events; we don't all do so in lockstep. Fortunately, we've had sympathetic reading from the most respected scholars of American music, general readers, and people in our home community (the same one that we write about.

Dave raises interesting questions about authorship, and we talk about it a bit in the book. In short, the subject is not even of much interest among people who mainly play music for pleasure or modest profit. It becomes a bigger deal for professional entertainers (like Emmett), whose livelihood depends on copyrights and royalties, in part. Snowdens had little to gain by asserting authorship, but Emmett surely did.

Finally, Q: a walkaround is a specific kind of minstrel performance bit, one that was used to close the show. It is not a generic term.
Regards,
Judy