Yankee Doodle

File:Yankee Doodle (sheet music).jpg

"Yankee Doodle" is a traditional song and nursery rhyme, the early versions of which predate the Seven Years' War and American Revolutionary War. It is often sung patriotically in the United States today. It is the state song of the U.S. state of Connecticut. Its Roud Folk Song Index number is 4501.

Origin

File:Philip Dawe, The Macaroni. A Real Character at the Late Masquerade (1773).jpg

"The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade", a 1773 mezzotint by Philip Dawe

The tune of "Yankee Doodle" is thought to be much older than the lyrics, being well known across western Europe, including England, France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. The melody of the song may have originated from an Irish tune "All the way to Galway", in which the second strain is identical to Yankee Doodle. There are rumors that the earliest words of "Yankee Doodle" came from a Middle Dutch harvest song which is thought to have followed the same tune, supposedly dating back as far as 15th-century Holland. It supposedly contained mostly nonsense words in English and Dutch: "Yanker, didel, doodle down, Diddle, dudel, lanther, Yanke viver, voover vown, Botermilk und tanther." Farm laborers in Holland were paid "as much buttermilk (Botermelk) as they could drink, and a tenth (tanther) of the grain".

The term Doodle first appeared in English in the early 17th century and is thought to be derived from the Low German dudel, meaning "playing music badly", or Dödel, meaning "fool" or "simpleton". The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became slang for being a fop. Dandies were men who placed particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisure hobbies. A self-made dandy was a British middle-class man who impersonated an aristocratic lifestyle. They notably wore silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their hats, and carried two pocket watches with chains—"one to tell what time it was and the other to tell what time it was not".

The macaroni wig was an example of such Rococo dandy fashion, popular in elite circles in Western Europe and much-mocked in the London press. The term macaroni was used to describe a fashionable man who dressed and spoke in an outlandishly affected and effeminate manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating, and gambling.

In British conversation, the term "Yankee doodle dandy" implied unsophisticated misappropriation of upper-class fashion, as though simply sticking a feather in one's cap would transform the wearer into a noble. Peter McNeil, a professor of fashion studies, claims that the British were insinuating that the colonists were lower-class men who lacked masculinity, emphasizing that the American men were womanly.

Early versions

The song was a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War. It was written at Fort Crailo around 1755 by British Army surgeon Richard Shuckburgh while campaigning in Rensselaer, New York. The British troops sang it to mock American soldiers as simpletons who thought that they were stylish simply by sticking a feather in their hats. It was also embraced by American troops, who added verses to it that mocked the British and hailed George Washington. By 1781, "Yankee Doodle" had become a song of national pride among Americans.

According to one account, Shuckburgh wrote the original lyrics after seeing the appearance of Colonial troops under Colonel Thomas Fitch, the son of Connecticut Governor Thomas Fitch. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "the current version seems to have been written in 1776 by Edward Bangs, a Harvard sophomore who also was a Minuteman." He wrote a ballad with 15 verses which circulated in Boston and surrounding towns in 1775 or 1776.

A bill was introduced to the House of Representatives on July 25, 1999, recognizing Billerica, Massachusetts, as "America's Yankee Doodle Town". After the Battle of Lexington and Concord, a Boston newspaper reported:

Upon their return to Boston [pursued by the Minutemen], one [Briton] asked his brother officer how he liked the tune now, – "Dang them", returned he, "they made us dance it till we were tired" – since which Yankee Doodle sounds less sweet to their ears.

The earliest known version of the lyrics comes from 1755 or 1758 (the date of origin is disputed):

The sheet music which accompanies these lyrics reads, "The Words to be Sung through the Nose, & in the West Country drawl & dialect." The tune also appeared in 1762 in one of United States first comic operas The Disappointment, with bawdy lyrics about the search for Blackbeard's buried treasure by a team from Philadelphia. An alternate verse that the British are said to have marched to is attributed to an incident involving Thomas Ditson of Billerica, Massachusetts. Ditson attempted to purchase a Brown Bess musket from a British soldier in the 47th Regiment of Foot in Boston in March 1775; after a group of the soldier's comrades spotted the transaction as it was occurring, they tarred and feathered Ditson in order to prevent any such illegal purchases from happening in the future. Ditson eventually managed to secure a musket and fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. For this reason, the town of Billerica is called the home of "Yankee Doodle":

Another pro-British set of lyrics believed to have used the tune was published in June 1775 following the Battle of Bunker Hill:

"Yankee Doodle" was played at the British surrender at Saratoga in 1777. A variant is preserved in the 1810 edition of Gammer Gurton's Garland: Or, The Nursery Parnassus, collected by Francis Douce, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford:

Full version

The full version of the song as it is known today:

Tune

The tune shares with the English language nursery rhymes "Simple Simon", "Jack and Jill", and "Lucy Locket", as well as the Japanese dōyō "Alps Ichiman Jaku". It also inspired the theme tune for the children's television series, Barney & the Backyard Gang, Barney & Friends, and the 1960s US cartoon series Roger Ramjet. Danish band Toy-Box sampled the tune in their song "E.T".

Notable renditions

The American state broadcaster Voice of America (VOA) uses the tune of Yankee Doodle as their interval signal. There is uncertainty over the origin of the VOA's decision to use the tune. In his 1990 memoir Being Red, Howard Fast claimed that while working as the VOA's chief news writer and news director in 1943, he selected "as a joke" Yankee Doodle for the broadcaster's interval signal.

I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire. I had long ago, somewhat facetiously, suggested “Yankee Doodle” as our musical signal, and now that silly little jingle was a power cue, a note of hope everywhere on earth, conveyed by short wave as well as by our four-hour American BBC. When I sat down to write “Good morning, this is the Voice of America,” I now have a grasp of things.

See also

• Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942 musical film
• "The Yankee Doodle Boy", 1904 song

External links

• Library of Congress Yankee Doodle music website
• #4d5a6b Hex Color - Yankee Doodle - Color Hex Map
• The Boston Yankee Doodle Ballad
• The free sheet music

Writings

• Report on "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Hail Columbia," "America," "Yankee Doodle" by Oscar George Theodore Sonneck (1909) 2 3 4
• Famous American songs (1906)

Historical audio

• Yankee Doodle (archive.org)
• John H. Hewitt wrote the song The Fall of Mexico in 1847, which quotes from Yankee Doodle in measure 237.