Yankee Doodle: A Song History

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Where the tune of "Yankee Doodle" came from is uncertain; Kate Van Winkle Keller of the Colonial Music Institute writes that any source it may have before the 1760s is unknown.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive likewise treats its beginnings as a matter of mystery and debate.[2] By tradition, a British army physician, Dr. Richard Shuckburgh, wrote words to it around 1755, but this is lore rather than established fact: the attribution has been traced to an early 19th-century journal, and the Johns Hopkins musicologist David Hildebrand doubts it.[2][3] Firmer evidence comes from a 1769 letter in which three Boston wardens complained to the commander of the British troops in the town that officers had ordered fifes at the Sunday changing of the guard to play the "Yankee Tune," mockingly, as the wardens assumed.[4]

Hand-colored print of red-coated British troops and colonial militia on Lexington green

The Battle of Lexington April 1775, reproduction of a print after Amos Doolittle, between 1940 and 1950. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.

According to research by J.A. Leo Lemay reported by the Traditional Tune Archive, the tune's first known appearance in print came in 1767 with Andrew Barton's ballad opera The Disappointment, whose Philadelphia premiere was cancelled four days before its scheduled April opening.[2][5] James Aird's Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs, dated 1782 and sometimes 1775–76, was once thought to hold its earliest corroborated printing.[2] The Traditional Tune Archive says Americans took the tune for their own after the fighting at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and long called it "The Lexington March"; the Massachusetts Historical Society likewise sees the British retreat from Lexington and Concord as the likely turning point, though a National Park Service article places the adoption after Bunker Hill.[2][4][6] Keller traces the familiar chorus to Boston-area verses of 1775, probably written after Washington's arrival, and counts upward of a hundred further topical texts in print by 1830, all sharing that melody and much the same refrain.[1] Hildebrand told Smithsonian that terms of surrender often specified whose band could play it, while the magazine calls the story of Lafayette having it played as the British marched out at Yorktown possibly apocryphal.[3]

The verse everyone knows, with the feather and the macaroni, has its earliest known printing in James Orchard Halliwell's The Nursery Rhymes of England of 1842.[1][3] A macaroni followed a showy European style that took hold in the 1760s, all oversized wigs, close-fitting clothes and feathered finery, so the verse works as a British jibe at the supposed foolishness of the American bumpkin.[3][6] Connecticut made "Yankee Doodle" its official state song by act of the legislature in 1978.[7]

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Sources

  1. George Washington's Mount Vernon (Colonial Music Institute): "What are the Real Words to 'Yankee Doodle'?" by Kate Van Winkle Keller.
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
  3. Smithsonian Magazine: "Yankee Doodle Was One of America's Earliest Protest Songs, but Its Origins Are Shrouded in Mystery".
  4. Massachusetts Historical Society: "The Curious Incident of the Music in the Morning".
  5. Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music: "Reconstruction of ballad opera The Disappointment (1767)".
  6. National Park Service: "The March of Maryland's Macaroni".
  7. State of Connecticut, Register & Manual: "Facts, Statistics and Holidays".