Mixed Race Studies

Mystery still surrounds ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’

The Houston Chronicle
Houston, Texas
2016-04-01

Joe Holley, Native Texan

A statue of “Emily Morgan” by Veryl Goodnight stands amidst a garden of yellow roses in an office complex across the street from Memorial City Mall in Houston. Photo: Joe Holley, Joe Holley/Houston Chronicle

So, what was happening in that red-and-white striped tent at about 4:30 on the afternoon of April 21, 1836? Santa Anna’s field tent at San Jacinto, that is.

Was the exhausted Mexican general in a deep daytime slumber, even as Gen. Sam Houston and his Texian army were massing for an attack just three-quarters of a mile away? That’s what Santa Anna said he was doing in a long report he presented to the Mexican government about that fateful spring day. (Actually, he said he was sleeping under a shade tree.)

Or, as Texas myth and the movies have it, was he entwined in the arms of a beautiful, young “mulatto” woman named Emily Morgan, the fabled “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and thus oblivious to the looming danger?

Of course, the latter is the spicy tale most of us would like to believe, although the intricate swirl of legend, lore and shrouded history makes it very difficult to tease out the truth. As Dallas attorney Jeff Dunn reminded me earlier this week, the Emily tale isn’t totally implausible, but with the evidence that’s been uncovered to date, there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. (Neither party took a selfie.)

Dunn, an amateur historian long interested in the Battle of San Jacinto, has researched the Emily story for 25 years. He’s as interested in how the story evolved and how it got entangled more than a century later with a popular minstrel song as he is in establishing the truth of the matter. He’ll be exploring both those issues at the annual San Jacinto Symposium next weekend here in Houston. The symposium topic is “African-Americans in Texas History from Spanish-Colonial Times to Annexation.”…

Read the entire article here.

The American folk song “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is but one testimony to the desire for mixed-race women.  The version of this song that most baby boomers were compelled to learn in grade school is devoid of its original reference to a mulatto slave woman, Emily Morgan (Horton 1993:137, Turner 1976), because through the decades the lyrics have been changed.

There’s a yellow rose in Texas that I am going to see,
No other darkey knows her, no darkey only me;
She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her we never more will part.

(Chorus)
She’s the sweetest rose of color this darkey ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew,
You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee,
But the yellow rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennessee.

The song was inspired by Morgan, who unwittingly played a decisive role in the defeat of General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón at San Jacinto.  According to Turner (1976), Morgan was a slave owned by Colonel James Morgan, who bought her in New York [City] and transported her to Texas in [October 25,] 1835.  There she was captured by General Santa Anna, whom she served as a concubine.  According to ethnologist William Bollaert, Sam Houston succeeded in a surprise attack in the battle of San Jacinto against Santa Anna, who was amorously engaged with Morgan.  While Morgan may have led to the demise of Santa Anna’s troups, she was also an inspiration for “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which has become integral to American folk music.

According to Turner (1976:49) the song was “composed and arranged expressly for Charles H. Brown by J. K. …  Through the years the identity of the initialed composer or arranger has remained a mystery” (see original lyrics in Appendix E).  Throughout the ensuing decades, writers have changed the lyrics, and after the 1858 and 1906 versions (see Appendices F and G), the term “darky” disappeared altogether, thus obliterating the metaphor of the yellow “rose.”  While lyrics can easily be changed, the historical accounts, and, indeed the progeny of mixed unions cannot obscure the genetic record. Despite theories that promulgated the inferiority of African women, it was not unusual for Europen American men to engage in conjugal relations with these same women.

Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 21.

Read more about the “Yellow Rose of Texas” here.